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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Even if asymptomatic people transmit the virus "asymptomatic transmission likely plays a minor role in the epidemic overall, WHO says. People who cough or sneeze are more likely to spread the virus, the agency wrote"[1]

[1] - https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non-symptomati...

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This sounds reassuring until you realise that "People who cough and sneeze" = all humans.

It is reassuring. You can avoid and protect yourself against coughing/sneezing humans. You can't really avoid an invisible carrier.

You are shadow banned btw. Since this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22316460

He looks alright to me

New to the party -- what does that mean and how do you know they're shadow banned?

HN has an infamous feature called shadowbanning whereby mods can ban a user in such a way that they can't tell that their account is banned. As far as the user is concerned they are not banned, but the comments they submit are immediately marked as dead when they are posted and hidden.

This feature is supposed to be used for cases such as spam bots or crazy people. However for whatever reason sometimes normal users end up shadowbanned.

You can tell if a user is shadowbanned if you have showdead on and most of their comments are dead for seemingly no reason. Yet they continue to post new comments unaware that they are banned.

Shadow banning is not unique to HN.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning

It's also known as hell banning.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban

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