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Comment by scottydelta | Hacker News Reader

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scottydelta

This is a form of shadow banning and it’s more common than you think. As a matter of fact, HN and Reddit do this too.

If HN/Reddit think that you are posting promotions, *HN silently censors your post, claims it was posted*

View on HN

We call that a dark pattern.

No, a dark pattern (at least in terms of UX) is when you intentionally mislead someone in order to gain something.

The purpose of shadow banning is to make it less obvious to the spammer that they triggered the spam filter, so they get less signals to work around.

Same as websites who, instead of blocking access to (computer) users they think are scrapers, change slight details in pages like for prices and whatnot.

HN reports that they no longer shadowban. Reddit absolutely does shadowban still, and rather capriciously and randomly.

Does that mean:

A - They have unShadowbanned all previously Shadowbanned users?

B - They are no longer actively shadowbanning users, but previous victims of Shadowbanning are going to stay that way?

Am asking since there is a big difference between the two.

Both are false. They still actively shadowban users and already banned users have stayed banned.

I'm interested in hearing reports, please email me if you can show me specific examples.

I'll see if I can remember to mail you in a few days when this account I'm using gets banned.

To be clear: I'm not claiming they don't ban users. They do. I've been told they don't shadowban users: they don't make it look like you're not banned while in reality your messages are all invisible to everyone but you... or so they've recently claimed.

AFAIK: "ban" and "shadow-ban" look the same: you can post comments, but they automatically [dead], the difference is just that if it's a "ban" you get told you are banned by a mod. And while it's probably a lot rarer nowadays, I believe e.g. the spam filter still automatically applies this without a message, it seems there is a system killing accounts that go too deep into negative karma, ...

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