[zacharycohn]

While shadowbanning has been made political, it is a key tool in managing a community. If you ban a troublemaker, they just make a new account. So if you can isolate a troublemaker without them understanding what's happening, you improve the community and reduce the whack-a-mole game.

And ultimately, "freedom of speech" refers to the government silencing speech, not private companies/private websites. We are all guests here, and if someone isn't upholding the standards the people who run this website want people to uphold, then they're free to do whatever they want.

[DisgracePlacard]

"Freedom of speech" does not simply refer to the 1st amendment - the concept has existed much longer than the USA has. I don't think GP is arguing that shadowbanned users have a "right" to use HN, instead they're saying that it is somewhat unethical because it is a form of lying.

As for shadowbanning being a key tool in managing a community - In HN's case, I imagine any shadowbanning system could be easily defeated, as a malicious actor could create a new account for every comment.

[shadowgovt]

Different frameworks of ethics disagree on whether lying is always unethical. Shadowbanning-as-lying can be seen as feeding misinformation to a hostile actor in an attempt to impede them. In that sense, it's no more unethical than someone demanding the combination to a safe so they can rob it and a person responding with a false combination.

> As for shadowbanning being a key tool in managing a community - In HN's case, I imagine any shadowbanning system could be easily defeated, as a malicious actor could create a new account for every comment.

New accounts have no history and no score, so they fit into the community in a (justifiably) low-reputation place. While you can do that, you'll have an army of "greentext" accounts and the community tends to downsample their opinions.

[latency-guy2]

> And ultimately, "freedom of speech" refers to the government silencing speech, not private companies/private websites. We are all guests here, and if someone isn't upholding the standards the people who run this website want people to uphold, then they're free to do whatever they want.

If you hold this opinion then you can never say water, food, shelter, internet, etc. are human rights either.