[dmoy]

To be fair on the last part, shadow ban can be an extremely efficient moderation tool, though for people caught up as false positive collateral damage it can really suck.

This is true even in hackernews I would assume, certainly it is any other place I've moderated before.

[dang]

When an account is established, we usually tell people we're banning them and why. Shadowbanning on HN is mostly for new accounts that show signs of either spamming or trolling. You're right, though, that there are still false positives in such cases, and those suck.

[lightedman]

"Shadowbanning on HN is mostly for new accounts that show signs of either spamming or trolling."

You routinely shadowban people you disagree with. Or post-limit them. You don't get to act innocent here when I guarantee you're just as guilty of these dark patterns as every other site.

[dang]

> You routinely shadowban people you disagree with

We don't ban people we disagree with. If we did, hardly anyone would be left unbanned.

As for shadowbanning, the practice is as I described it: if the account is established, we tell people we're banning them and why (your account was an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15615092). If an account is new, different rules apply: we (meaning some combo of software and moderators) have to make a guess about whether the account is legit or not. If the guess is that they're spamming or trolling, we shadowban the account. We guess wrong sometimes, but we do what we can to correct those cases. And we're always happy to unban anyone who gives us reason to believe that they'll follow the site guidelines in the future.

Rate limiting is a separate issue. If an account posts too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or gets involved in flamewars, we rate limit how much they can post in the future. It's annoying and crude, but it's one of the few software tools we have to prevent comment quality from degenerating too quickly. Again, people are welcome to email [e-mail] and we take the rate limit off if they commit to not repeating that behavior. It's not hard to get an account unbanned or unpenalized if you really want to use HN as intended.

[lightedman]

"It's not hard to get an account unbanned and/or unpenalized if you really want to use HN as intended."

For the most part, I DO use HN as intended, IN SPITE of your shadowbanning. You just refuse to read my posting history to see that much.

This clearly shows I have more integrity than you, as you won't dare unhide any of my decent comments, instead preferring to make yourself look the victim by only unbanning my comments which you can unban to make me look bad. You're the real issue here, not me.

[dang]

We've unkilled a lot of your comments and would be happy to restore more if we missed some good ones.

[gizmo686]

On a free product, I have no problems with shadow bans.

On a paid product, shadow bans seem like a pretty clear case of fraud.

[yumario]

Yep, having used Tinder's paid boots and seeing no results. And then making a new profile with the same photos and bio! and getting results within minutes left me feeling rob and manipulated.

[xyzzy_plugh]

This is an excellent case for a chargeback. It's up to the merchant to prove they were in the right, and in the meantime you get your money back.

[dmoy]

Ah I've never used any of those apps I just sort of assumed they're free.