[tinus_hn]

It has been shown time and again that these conspiracies turn out to be big nothingburgers. The moderators deserve to be taken in good faith.

Be aware that if you think something’s off you can also just email the moderators first! They tend to respond quite quickly.

[travelhead]

Instead of a vague comment, why not read the article or respond to the specific accusations outlined on the thread?

Here’s a concrete example from two of my posts. My first submission received 511 points with 267 comments and was on the front page of HN and received national news attention. This clearly shows interest from HN about Amazon’s power against small Amazon sellers.

My next post was shadow banned by Dang and was wiped off the submission page within a few minutes, without even a chance to be downvoted or upvoted by my peers.

The HN moderators have too much power and control, especially in regardless to lack of transparency and arbitrary opinions on who to shadow ban.

1. Delisted on Amazon – “Defective Product” with 6 complaints of 5164 sold in 2021 (travelhead.medium.com) 1 point by travelhead 3 months ago | past

2. Amazon competitor got our belt listing taken down by saying it contains drugs (travelhead.medium.com) 511 points by travelhead 4 months ago | past |

[gus_massa]

My guess is that the second article is too similar to the first one. (It's not the same case, it's about a similar problem you had with Amazon, but it's similar.)

It's strange it's [dead]. I'd expect it to had a manual penalty to avoid repetition, but I don't expect it to be [dead].

> However, an HN moderator did not like the article, so he shadow banned me.

Did they shadowban your account? Or your website? Or only killed the post? Do you see the post as [dead]?

Looking at your submissions and comments history, the last post are all about your sites. There is no hard rule against that here, but it may trigger some of the automated antispam or an error by a moderator.

Have you asked by mail about that case?

[travelhead]

The post was shadow banned.

As far as similarities between posts, yes they are both about my experience with Amazon.

I agree HN moderators should flag spam accounts, remove automated bots, and focus on improving overall quality of HN.

What I fail to see is why the “new submissions” page is so heavily moderated that the HN moderators feel like my post was worthy of a shadow ban, when my previous post made national news attention and the front page of HN with 511 upvotes and 267 comments.

If a post is not spam, then let the users decide to upvote or downvote it.

HN proclaims itself to be a social news site, but this is clearly false. The content MUST align with the views of HN moderators or you won’t stand a chance at even a few people seeing your post. This was made evident by my post getting shadow banned by Dang within a few minutes of submission.

Also remember, shadow banning is the most severe form of censorship. By not alerting the user that his post is not visible to other users, they give the user no chance to appeal or even know that his post has zero distribution on the platform, in order to not draw attention to the censorship.

HN moderators clearly did not want me to know that my post was removed, in order to prevent threads like this appearing on HN. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this entire thread was removed because we are discussing HN / HN moderators in a negative light. That is the exact definition of censorship. The powers that be don’t want their content moderation policies exposed, in order to maintain the illusion of HN as a site that aggregates and votes on content by your peers.

>>Have you asked by mail about that case?

Yes, I have a very lengthy email correspondence with the HN moderator who shadow banned the submission. He said it was similar to my prior post (it's absolutely not, it's a totally different topic) and that it was self-promotion (it's not, the reason why my prior post went to the front page of HN with 511 upvotes and 267 comments was because of my experience as a small business selling on Amazon.