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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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