But having been on the end of it myself with other accounts here -just for disagreeing with people who were obviously more 'in with the in crowd' than me- and without even receiving any warning first, I think the way it is sometimes implemented is pretty childish.
I don't know that it shouldn't be used just because of philosophical objections, but it certainly messes with the idea that a system is meant to either obey or refuse the command given by the user, and do so honestly. Lying to the user that yes, the post is published, while it's intentionally hidden, breaks the assumption that a system will behave consistently.
If some users don't want to act honestly, rest of society should not honour their malice. Honouring malice leads to dissolution of society.
What I meant is that shadow banning is, by design, an invisible punishment - and therefore, you cannot see that you've been caught up into it as a false positive and punished. This doesn't happen on systems without shadow banning in place.
1. Don't ban users
2. Ban users and tell them
3. Ban users and don't tell them\
4. Don't allow free accounts
Unless you know a better solution, we have to accept shadow banning as a speed bump. And like speed bumps, they unfortunately sometimes catch good-willing users, but make life better for thousands of other users.
It’s better to correct one’s behavior if one knows what the hell they are correcting. Correction and rehabilitation can’t have progress if you just put them in their own echo chamber.
Shadowbanning could go away if people were actually ostracized, which means expelling from community. Currently if you ban someone, you only ban a single account and they can create another one. Some people are banned not because they don't know what they do, they are banned because they are intentional on destruction of society. They won't learn anything from banning them. That's where shadowbanning comes in, they can shitpost all they want, but rest of us doesn't have to listen to them.
This is still assuming good faith on the commenter's part—some people don't want to correct their behavior. Maybe they're doing it for money, or for attention, or maybe they just like annoying others.
And even if you are someone that might be willing to correct your behavior, it's not HN's responsibility to guide you to rehabilitation, when it comes at the cost of making the conversation worse for everyone else along the way.