Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about the outlawing of shadow banning.

As a former content moderator, I found shadow banning to be remarkably effective for our most pernicious actors, who would otherwise quickly realize that their account is banned and create multiple new ones.

View on HN

These days the most effective method is phone number verification. It's possible but significantly harder to get around this.

It's fine if you don't mind losing legit users and keep the more motivated spammers.

Phone numbers have been so abused that it's a leap of faith to give it to an additional service hoping they wont go to town with it. Then you'll find a number of services that will attribute virtual numbers that can receive SMS, so it won't stop motivated spammers/scammers (tbf nothing will ? but now you have them "verified"))

All in all it feels like a losing proposition to me, but I don't know your situation.

It's not transparent so it's easily abused with the victim possibly not even knowing they've been punished, let alone having any recourse. We saw that with Twitter shadowbanning people in ambiguous ways for political reasons to manipulate the public opinion.

This might sound funny since I'm shadowbanned on here myself :P But I probably deserved it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com