[crankylinuxuser]

> It contains troll harassment. By not letting a troll know they've been banned, you remove the incentive they might have to create a new account to continue their harassment.

Completely false.

It only adds another step, which is "check account with a private session". I'm sure eventually shadowbanning will also look at what IP address and also lie as well. But right now I don't know any sites that do that.

But shadowbanning is a disgusting practice, and is completely anti-transparency. It can be used to further political agendas (like the article is about). And if an account is spewing troll garbage, just delete, add to a mod log, and close. But very few sites are open like this. (The only site I'm aware of was the old site kuro5hin.org).

edit: And not only shadowbanning, but flags/dead also are abused here on HN. Its all too easy for a legit post with a differing (non-trollish) viewpoint that differs from the status quo, get -1'ed into oblivion, and then summarily flaggedkilled. Again, I've seen this happen when it appeared that there was some sort of concerted campaign to silence certain opinions. Requests to require a comment for flags/-1's, or even a 'who modded this' have gone unanswered.

[effingwewt]

As is what happened to your comment here. As soon as comments go up they are dead, or -1 so hard mins after posting its almost invisible though not quite dead. I assume my comments are the same.

As an aside, this taught me early on with this site never to look for replies to my comments. Also aided by the fact HN does not notify you of replies, which then kills most discourse unless the drive-by kind.

It's gotten to the point where I skip JUST to the showdead comments here just to see the dissenting views, or more often as of late, correct information someone has for no reason flagged.

Fuck a shadowban, this forum pretends to be adult and treat us as such, but as with most things it's just lipservice.

Its like mentioning the very obvious trolls on any post critical of china. here comes dang to say 'you cant do that' while the trolls post all over the forum and kill all dissenting comments. We have all seen this time and again but WE are the dicks for pointing it out.

Pretending astroturfing doesnt gappen hurts the forums. Pretending dissenting comments arent there just hurts the forums.

Ive been here for a looong time, 3rd account over the years (forgotten pws or whatever, I never care as I've never posted enough to have the karma to even downvote), but it feels like this place has reached the tipping point.

So I'm here, for the moment, but mostly to read, and only until something better comes along.