3 ms·

Purpose of posting that you did

• dang 6y ago
  It's basically treating people the way we'd want to be treated ourselves. Also, it's good to convey to the community some of the things we ban people for and where the lines are. HN used to shadowban (i.e. ban people without telling them), but it led to a lot of resentment, not just from the banned users but from many community members who don't think that's fair. At the time, there wasn't much of an alternative because HN had one moderator (pg) and he was also working on YC and raising small children. It takes a ton of time and energy to write such comments and to engage with user responses about them. We still shadowban accounts when they're new and show signs of spamming or trolling: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20shadowban&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... p.s. Banning mostly just means that your posts are autokilled. They're still visible to anyone with 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile.