I think it is a childish and offending policy and am still surprised that HN does that. I mean *who* <i>does</i> that? To make it look to you as if your post got published, but really it didn't? Is that your way of being polite, perhaps? Or your way to maximally offend someone by pretending to be polite? [EDIT: wish I wouldn't have written that next sentence (was a bit pissed off) but too late to erase now with people commenting it] What a slimy and cowardly tactic. What a manifetation of the worst part of human nature.<p>If you ban and censor us, why don't you just tell us so? We're all big boys and girls.
Shadowbanning has two obvious benefits for the site:<p>1) Increases the time it takes trolls to realize they need to create a new account.<p>2) Pacifies angry, malicious users who might escalate their bad behavior when instantly banned.<p>I haven't seen HN use shadowbanning to censor anyone. The people who are shadowbanned all seem to post unhinged, profane, off-topic, content-free rants.<p>Personally, I think it makes the community better. If you find it slimy and cowardly, perhaps you should vote with your feet and visit other communities instead. There are millions of other message boards.
It’s extremely effective and reduce the moderators workload a lot, because creating a new account and farming karma again is easy. However many spammers and unwanted commenters never notice that they are ghost banned.<p>I agree that it’s not nice to them, which is acceptable most of the time for most people because the ghost banned members are not really nice community members. It is an issue when someone is ghost banned for bad reasons or a bit too fast.
I can see the thinking behind it. Why let a spammer know no-one is seeing their junk? They'll just keep creating new accounts.<p>But having been on the end of it myself with other accounts here -just for disagreeing with people who were obviously more 'in with the in crowd' than me- and without even receiving any warning first, I think the way it is sometimes implemented is pretty childish.
<p><pre><code> > We're all big boys and girls.
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We (as a species) overall do <i>not</i> behave like adults, really. Not on the internet anyway's, or at least <i>not all the time.</i><p>But here is the thing: @dang is trying to keep peace and order. He is not trying to be evil or nice. He is "managing" us. Literally. And this path of the least resistance seems to be working fine-ish.<p>Personally, I hate having a great article be "flagged" or immediately down-voted. It is more worrisome that posting a similar article some hours later will make it into the top 10 for the same unfathomable reasons. It appears that being up or down voted is more or less emergent (and random?), and that saddens me a bit.
I agree.<p>It's one thing to shadow-ban an obvious troll.<p>The problem is, just like censorship, where do you stop?<p>For example, I'm an infrequent commenter on Youtube, and then mostly perfectly agreeable, but just this one time I posted a scathing comment on a video. And just this one comment was shadow-banned, I'm guessing at the request of the video author. I tried to show my comment to a friend, and the comment simply did not exist for them, or for several other accounts.<p>I find this kind of <i>selective</i> ghosting, 'invisibly' deleting any critical comments, to be extremely pernicious.
It's worse in videogames like Dark Souls or mobile PUBG where they simply send you off to the shadowrealm of "like-minded" players. And there's no going back. It's a sign of understaffed moderation teams.