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Comment by tim44 | Hacker News Reader

Shadow banning is some real underhanded sh#t. On reddit I explained that mayor Pete's M4A wasn't the same M4A as the world understood it. A user immediately responds accusing of me editing my comment to deceive. I say prove it you f#cking liar, there are services that archive. Then I'm hit with the ban for being profane and harassing. Yup, turns out the comment had been very quickly shadow-banned lol. I should have known. But this might inform people that its not only conservatives who's speech is threatened; it's anyone who speaks contrary to the mainstream.

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People who use profanity and personal insults tend to heavily degrade the quality of a forum. And when banned, they react angrily and make alternate accounts again and again.

A shadowban reduces the incentive to dodge bans via new usernames. Reddit mods don’t have Ip address access or other tools, so shadowbans are a necessary tool.

You weren’t banned for speaking contrary to the mainstream. You were banned for insults and personal attacks, indicating you weren’t likely to lead to productive conversations.

Hey I broke the rules, what can I say. But that wasn't really the point. This is also an interesting take on profanity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13412107

But let me actually amend my comment above here, it wasn't even that bad, the actual words were "lying a#s." I just felt like there was an interaction that didn't need to happen because people see different sets of comments, my original comment being nothing but fact and dry. I don't know how we can talk much about profanity derailing discussion when discussion is so fundamentally broken.

Yeah I actually do think that the profanity can indicate more honesty. The trouble is, if it’s also combined with a personal attack on others it inflames conversations. Two people can then rile themselves up and derail an entire thread.

Of course the comment replying to you did the same thing: made a personal attack on you, and it derailed you into a personal attack with swearing.

Sure. And what's most interesting to me is that both personal attacks and swearing were caused by this underhanded version of censorship. It in effect caused what it is supposed to solve.

Is it true that a very active participant on Reddit was shadow banned a while back, and he didn't realize it for two years?

Happens every day. Mods can do a form of shadowbanning on a specific subreddit. So the very active and unaware can keep posting and posting and not know.

I don’t necessarily think this is unreasonable if used judiciously against the type of account which has shown unwillingness to heed rules or mod warnings.

> But this might inform people that its not only conservatives who's speech is threatened

Agree that it's all over the place, but it's depressing to see left's attitude that they have the numbers now to attack the same free speech which helped so many efforts in the last twenty years.

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