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Comment by gitweb | Hacker News Reader

Let's not forget about the good old shadow ban that HN uses when you get downvoted, even if you have a legitimate comment. You'd get shadow banned today for comments like the Earth is round if people don't agree with it or find it controversial to say it. Where they still let you comment, and make you think others can see it but if you sign out or view the discussion from a different IP your comments aren't even there.

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I have showdead turned on so see shadow banned comments.

What you're claiming is wrong and misleading. It's rare and almost always justified.

For the times it isn't, which I haven't seen for a few years, I've emailed those people where they've shown an email.

They usually say thanks, that other people have also emailed them and they'll contact the mod team.

i.e. there are plenty of long-term members of this site that keep an eye on shadow bans and we generally thintk it's working as intended.

I checked one out a couple of days ago, and literally 4 comments earlier dang had warned them that if they kept it up with the short, low-quality comments they'd probably end up shadow-banned.

What you are trying to do here is justify the practice and misrepresent the truth about what is actually happening. How is what I said wrong and misleading? Most people aren't going to associate an email address with an account because like other users here we've seen the mods consistently biased in how they enforce their policies. Why not just notify them when they login, or disable the reply feature altogether instead of wasting their time thinking they are posting?

You also use the word troll but I've seen people get shadowbanned that weren't trolls, but people in the thread simply didn't like their comments because they were advocating for open source solutions or for sharing negative criticism about a company based on their real-life experiences.

I'm sure there are legitimate cases to ban users, but shadow-banning is just poor ethics. Just ban people if you don't want users that may go against the typical pro-corporate yes man type agenda rather than mislead and say that they are trolls, when apparently (based on my experience) your definition of troll is someone who doesn't go along with the topics general opinion even if they have legitimate reasons not to.

If you use the search function at the bottom of the page and look for "dang shadow ban" you can come up with multiple comments by the moderator talking about HN policies, such as this one that I have quoted in part:

We do tell people that we're banning them, and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - but only once the account has an established history. We treat new accounts differently, for reasons I've explained before. I'll try to dig that up... Edit: here you go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288858

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666742

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20289994

It's a bimodal distribution in that we treat these disjoint groups very differently. With established accounts, we warn them before banning, usually several times, and then tell them we're banning them and why. With new accounts, we don't say we're banning because the population of banned-new-accounts is overwhelmingly spammers and trolls, often serial trolls who have been banned many times and know perfectly well what they're doing.

Link to the entire comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686672

So what is a new account? Let's say that they've posted hundreds of times, or the account is over 30 days or 90 days old? You're telling me you still don't shadowban if they go below a certain threshold and that you don't rate limit to maybe one or two responses in a 2 hour period. Also, how do you contact them specifically? What if someone has proof of not being contacted. Are you going to retract your statement?

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