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Comment by CyberShadow | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that shadowbanning was a moderation technique reserved for the admins, and unavailable to subreddit moderators; IIRC, it also applied to the entire website.

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Some moderators do a soft shadowban where they simply delete every post you make in their sub with no notification. The is functionally like a shadowban - you can see the post in your history and have no way of knowing it was deleted without signing out or using a different account, other than a suspicious lack of votes or replies.

> you can see the post in your history and have no way of knowing it was deleted without signing out or using a different account, other than a suspicious lack of votes or replies.

Reveddit [1] or its accompanying extension [2] can alert you when this happens. I'm the author. You can see the behavior yourself on r/CantSayAnything [3] or read more in the FAQ [4].

[1] https://www.reveddit.com/about/

[2] https://www.reveddit.com/add-ons/direct/

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/

[4] https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/

Good to know, thanks! I use /r/shadowban currently. Providing more resources in this area is definitely appreciated.

Mods can set up automoderator with a shitlist of users whose messages are deleted the very moment they're posted, as the moderation system is built into reddit now.

So it's not a true shadowban, but any posts you make on subreddits who have shitlisted you will get deleted instantly.

And of course when a post of yours is deleted on reddit by a mod, reddit does not tell you this or indicate it to you in any way.

Some of the posts that I made post-shadowban were let through, and some were only removed after they had been up for several hours and gained replies. So it looks like they were manually deleting my posts.

I've long since stopped caring about the ban itself, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't curious to learn the reason for it!

Sometimes, if you're very, very lucky, the moderators will take a look at the posts automod deleted and then manually approve them, which still lets them through. When verifying this, make sure you use an incognito browser tab to see what's actually been deleted. It's all very user-hostile, but should be noted that HN does similar.

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