Ask HN: What should a user know about how HN moderation works in practice? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What should a user know about how HN moderation works in practice?

2 pointsdekervin10 comments

It seems I am in some kind of shadow ban, but I just realized it. I am not even sure it's the case, when it started or what was the reason. Never got a hint it could happen. Is there some process to get out of the purgatory, or to check what caused it, or even only a way to confirm it's effectively the case ?

I am asking here just to understand from others experience. And I am just wanting to know what I should know, nothing more ( I don't think it warrants more than that).

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What are the symptoms of your kind-of-shadow ban?

I made a submission. Then I went outside on an errand and checked there to see if there was some comments. I couldn't find the post via search or in "new posts". Thinking of an error, I checked my profile without logging in and couldn't find the submission.

But when I came back home, I could still find the submission on my profile while logged in. I guess that's is some kind of shadow ban ?

You are not shadow-banned from what I can tell. Your lists of submissions and comments seem fine. There is a particular submission that is [dead] which makes it look like it was automatically tagged by the system.

Oh, thanks for that info. That's what I meant by things "I don't know that I don't know" :) . That reason didn't even cross my mind.

It would be useful if there was some kind of central place to learn about various "unexpected" behavior of HN, maybe something crowdsourced. I am just writing it down here since you have probably more experience !

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

This is awesome !!! thanks a lot. Exactly what I had in mind :)

Yeah, it looks like the domain huffpost.com is banned.

Thanks for the info. The [dead] tag doesn't show up for me, so I don't have any way to learn and correct my future behavior, if that's indeed the reason.

It's actually ironic in that case since I specifically chose what I thought was a reputable source as I didn't want the conversation to be derailed by stupid arguments veering into conspiracy territory; silly me :) .

I should update my prior on the reputation of that source.

(Edit: the original comment I replied to was a bit different, the structure changed while I was writing my reply)

Conspiracy theory territory.

Which shouldn't be a problem.

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