Comment by txcwpalpha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by txcwpalpha | Hacker News Reader

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>Regular moderators can effectively shadowban inside their subreddits by using AutoModerator and telling it to remove all posts made by certain users.

While your comment makes it sound like AutoMod just removes comments, what I think you're meaning to point out is that AutoMod can selectively hide all of a user's comments to everyone except for the comment author, which is the exact same as shadowbanning, and isn't just a simple comment removal.

A lot of subreddits use this feature now, too. Some automatically shadowban any user that doesn't have above a certain amount of karma, while others auto shadowban everyone and then only maintain a whitelist of authorized posters. If you've ever posted on a subreddit and gotten zero replies/votes, it's worth going into incognito mode and trying to view your comment from there. Chances are, your account is shadowbanned in that subreddit.

Yeah, that's how all comment removals on reddit work though (which, you're right, many users don't realize).

Users can only know their comments are removed if they check from logged-out or another account, or if the moderators notify them by posting a reply or messaging (which some do, but not a lot of the time overall).

Ah, you're right. I imagine most users aren't aware of this because they assume that if their comment was removed, they would see the "[removed]" tag like they see for everyone else's removed comments.

And either many redditors have never had their comments removed, or more likely, shadowbanning is apparently a lot more effective than people realized.

Yeah, it's not uncommon at all to see things like, "Edit: Wow, this whole chain of comments was removed, except for mine!" because people don't realize that the site actively hides whether your posts are removed.

Pretty much all of reddit's moderation tools were created 10+ years ago for anti-spam purposes, and have hardly been changed since then. They don't work very well for how they're actually used now.

It is really sad to see Reddit stagnate on spam handling, but the dev resources at Reddit seem to be laser focused on making the new UI & features that ease the transition from Facebook to Reddit.

Most of the subreddits with active mods and communities have yet to stylize and reimplement their custom CSS, sidebar and links on the new UI (or can't due to limitations of the new UI), which means lots of people using the new UI miss out on key features that differentiate a subreddit from the rest of Reddit.

In fact, mods have no other option. If a mod deletes one of your comments, you won't know unless they tell you.

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