Hacker News Reader

Comment by drummer | Hacker News Reader

Yeah shadowbanning is not cool, and it is still used here on HN. This shows once again that you cannot trust these corporations with your information and sure as fuck not with your livelihood. Facebook, patreon, google, youtube, twitter, apple, etc. Ironically even medium where this article is posted, as they regularly shadowban accounts.

View on HN

HN has showdead and vouching, which imho substantially reduce the negative effects of shadowbanning.

I run showdead, and most shadowbanned accounts deserve it. I also rescue the occasional comment from the grave.

Do the moderators un-shadowban users if they get enough vouched comments? No idea, but they do have enough information to do so.

I'll often come across shadow banned comments, and when I look at the author's post history (back to the first dead comment, plus a few pages of comments before) I really don't see anything wrong. Is it because the comment(s) that got them banned have been removed?

When I run across such an account, should I email an HN mod to investigate? I wouldn't mind doing that, but I've tried before and never got a reply back -- so not sure what the outcome was.

It's possibly because of a single comment (out of n, where n is large) of disagreeing with the crowd or saying something unpleasant or a mod powertripping.

It's stupid as fuck. Reddit is also plagued by it.

I am shadow banned. I think because of one comment I made many years ago that was heavily downvoted? I just don't log in anymore. I emailed PG at the time and he said there's nothing he can do.

I presume that sometimes, it's a new account of someone who has been permanently banned for bad behavior.

Emailing a mod can't hurt, though.

I wish there was a page to see just flagged stories. Many are noise, of course, but I notice that there are a number of really good submissions there as well.

What GitHub did wasn't shadowbanning though. They had a banner for him that said the account was flagged. Should they have sent an email? Absolutely, but that's not a shadowban.

Shadowbanning is super effective against trolls though, which HN does get a few of from time to time. Github though should not suspend accounts with active repositories like this; if they shadowban abusive / trolling commenters then sure, but that too can be made granular, e.g. shadow their comments but don't 404 their repositories.

Self-hosting is better, I agree, but people use medium, github, twitter, youtube etc because they'll instantly have a much bigger audience. I mean a self-hosted github alternative should be easy to set up on your own servers.

Actually if you operate a JS library with things like a CDN and hosted icons, you probably should. Sure, github is free for things like that, but you - and your users who depend on you - cannot depend on them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com