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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

Reddit's been shadow banning forever. HN does it, too.

yes they do! i read this website for months before posting and then all my posts would always get deleted or deleted secretly. so i realized ive just been reading propaganda this whole time. i was gutted. feels like ive been lied to the entire time. you just naturally assume youre reading what people actually think. i wish there was a way to go back to the old internet where there wasnt massive amounts of money involved in policing peoples conversations

Reddit stopped using shadowbans to ban actual users a while ago, it's only for spammers now. Of course, it still happens now and then accidentally, but it's not meant to be a punishment for real users that break sitewide rules.

In my experience, all new accounts that try to post in main subreddits will be shadowbanned until a certain level of karma is accrued.

I think you mean the automod setting that autodeletes your comments if your account is too new? That's something entirely different and not a sitewide ban like a shadowban would be. That's up to the moderators of the subreddit.

I'm not sure that's justification for continuing the policy. Most people are surprised to discover mods can "remove your comment and it still shows up on your side as if it wasn't removed". [1]

Reddit gave mods the ability to shadow ban about 5 years ago via automod [2]. Now even crowd control can remove comments [3]. These features would be fine, in my opinion, if users could discover when their comments were removed.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/jp4j76/google_a...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_sp...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/qhpr6i/crowd_contr...

The issue is that auto mods are stupid and heavy handed, and backed up by authoritarian mods making conversation impossible.

I get it, and I don’t have to keep attempting to contribute to it.

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