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Comment by gouggoug | Hacker News Reader

I suspect your shadowban is related to how new your account was, its de-facto low reputation and its even lower reputation due heavily downvoted comments you made: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=turdistheword

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I believe domains can also be downranked/shadowbanned separately from users. Given that this Ask HN post went through OK, I am guessing that is more likely here. And I would agree that articles from the Guardian are almost certainly going to be off-topic based on the guidelines. If the post is on topic, you can always reach out to moderators.

New accounts are only default shadowbanned when created from a known VPN IP or a known "bad" IP for which user creation isn't yet banned. The shadowban expires after a couple months (?) which is why sometimes you'll see accounts making their first visible comment even though they were created some time ago.

Accounts with a high comment flag rate are timed out. New accounts with a sufficiently high comment flag rate are permanently timed out.

Accounts likely operated by known trolls are manually shadowbanned.

Those all seem like decent common-sense policies as long as those users are made aware of the ban/time-out and any applicable time-out-countdowns.

Sadly, there are "known bad" IPs--hell even entire blocks.

I'm relatively new here and, heretofore, had no idea "browsing dead" was even an option.

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