Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Would you mind linking to the thread? I know it's been removed, but I'm curious which subreddit that happened in.

Also, did anyone ever explain why he was shadowbanned? Only Reddit admins can shadowban someone, and I thought they only issued bans for vote manipulation, not for causing controversy.

View on HN

> Only Reddit admins can shadowban someone

I'm a mod of a default subreddit. We can't shadowban people from the entire site, but we can use AutoModerator to moderate comments and shadowban users in a specific subreddit based on certain criteria (e.g. one day old account with negative comment karma or if account mentions certain keywords) or by manually adding a user to a shadowban list. This is separate from reddit's built-in subreddit ban, which is much more obvious.

It's possible (and sounds a lot like) he got banned/shadowbanned in /r/news and the mods there thought his self-promotion went too far and got reported for spam to maybe be banned outright from reddit. That seems excessive though. I usually just tell people to do a better job contributing to reddit if they're being spammy, and I only report people when they're creating new accounts to harass others.

Someone might want to message the mods of whatever subreddit he was banned from. I don't know enough about the situation to feel justified in doing so. But I checked /r/spam, and found this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/spam/comments/2g5k5k/overview_for_db...

Couple of very high karma users who sound like domain experts vouched for him.

That said, it doesn't look like he was shadowbanned sitewide. Most likely an automoderator action. I can still click on his user profile.

Edit: unrelated, but how do you generate a submission history for a user? I'm a mod of a smaller sub, that looks like a useful tool.

I don't mod a default, but in my experience it's historically been really easy to get someone shadowbanned for self-promotion by submitting to r/spam. I don't know if it's run by a script or just overworked interns, but anyone technically breaking the 20% rule over any period of time has tended to get the axe without consideration of mitigating factors (celebrity, posting to subs that encourage self-promotion, etc).

I don't know if that's changing with the drama over r/gamedeals company reps being repeatedly shadowbanned for trolls submitting them to r/spam, but not optimistic.

It's linked in that blog post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/2g43kw/a_generic_drug...

He used multiple accounts to vote-ring.

What's your source?

I highly doubt that a doctor who was receiving massive traction on reddit would stoop so low as to fake-upvote his own article.

> massive traction

For an example of one accused of such see [0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan

Unidan has his own Wikipedia article? Wow, I didn't know the whole thing got well known enough for that outside of Reddit.

I know HN likes making endnotes and 0-based indexing... but this seems excessive

...and something of which I'm apparently very guilty[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mendelk

Vote rings can also downvote other articles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com