Answer: it WAS to invite people who run shadowbanned sites, they just don't acknowledge that there is such a thing.
It WAS to invite shadowbanned sites that they don't acknowledge exist ... why? Is there some other euphemism that they use to describe these sites, and that would make some sense as a group of people to give special attention to?
Unfortunately, many legitimate niche websites were demoted by this update. Google's Webmaster outreach team (primarily Danny Sullivan, also known as "SearchLiason") has been in contact with people running such legitimate websites.
This event was supposed to bring such people together with Product Managers and Engineers at Google.
Someone from the data science side at Google, who is probably very far removed from the actual ranking algorithm, said that there was no shadowbanning of domains. That is, of course, total crap and probably just the result of some misunderstanding of what banning, demoting, penalizing, etc., means to different people.
The people at Google who actually work on communicating to webmaster never said there was no shadowbanning.
The writer is too lazy to say.
It seemed super suspicious from the jump, I kept asking myself, “There has to be more to this story, this guy is being incredibly vague, is there more to this?”
A couple days after his media circus tour, videos from other people started popping up. these videos told us a little bit more. video after video of this guy—for hours—trying to start fights with dozens of people. multiple videos of him complaining while getting ejected from various bars by bouncers. he spent like 6 hours at many, many bars provoking and then feigned shock when it happened. “my hat. every time i go to this particular city, they physically beat me because they don’t like my hat” … ya left a little bit of important context out eh friend?
this blog post feels very similar to me as that guys initial video. something is missing.