7 ms·

Related, my account is shadow-blocked from up/down voting posts, and I think from flag/vouch as well. I think there was a period where I was too aggressive in m

Related, my account is shadow-blocked from up/down voting posts, and I think from flag/vouch as well. I think there was a period where I was too aggressive in moderation and it must have triggered something. I can test this by checking a poster's karma before and after voting - I used to be able to see the increment/decrement and now I can't. I can still upvote stories.

shock 5y ago
Same in my case. At the end of the day, it's just another form of censorship. It broke the illusion I had of HN being something special and I'm glad it did. Better spend that energy elsewhere.
- version_five 5y ago
  There is a shadow banned sibling post to this, which given the subject would be worth including. I did vouch but I don't think my votes count as I explained. If you turn on showdead in your settings, you can see the post and vouch for it
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  > At the end of the day, it's just another form of censorship. This is how I feel right now, since there doesn’t seem to be a good way to openly debate the policies (or dark patterns like shadow bans) once you become subject to actions taken under those policies. All you can do is appeal to the moderators by email. It’s something, but a private conversation isn’t the same as a community debate. And a community debate isn’t possible once you are silenced. I’m not sure what the right solution is. In my case, someone called me a nitwit and my response to them was deemed engaging in a flamewar even though I was mostly just clarifying my earlier comment/stance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30255599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30255599). And then upon further investigation from the moderator, I apparently didn’t have the right mix of topics I post on and was deemed to be engaging in ideological battle. It seems arbitrary to me because here are the topics I see in my recent comments: Canada protest, climate change, Neil Young, biometric identity verification, a tool to contact representatives, the Olympics, MacBook Pros, Google Slides, GoFundMe (I had many comments on this one admittedly), search engine results, Delta airline policy, compensation trends, cars, Microsoft Teams, mathematics, Roku spyware, and rent increases. So what is a well meaning user to do if they want to just engage on the stories most meaningful to them? Is it really a bad thing to post on topics that are controversial rather than straightforward? On the other hand, I am not sure what other community is better than HN, even if I dislike censorship. So maybe they’re doing something right and I’m on the wrong side of it after all.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Your comment caught my attention. I took a look. You're right that the exchange you linked to wasn't banworthy. But that exchange wasn't the problem. The fundamental problem is that you're not writing from a position of intellectual curiosity. But the real issue is that you're interfering with why people come to the site: to be entertained. Almost all moderation actions make sense when viewed through that lens, and it took many years to realize and accept this hard truth. People mostly aren't here for some sort of enlightenment, or to save the world, or to have their minds changed about politics. When you post here, you're broadcasting to millions of people, and around 50k of them see and engage with the top comments on a thread. That's the high level overview. Zooming back into your account, within the last week you've posted almost entirely on political topics. That's not necessarily a bad thing (but it's usually a bad sign). The issue is that you have to frame these topics in a very delicate, substantive (double underscores on "substantive") way. In the "Florida governor to investigate GoFundMe" thread, you spawned ten different subthreads. In the future, when you sense a topic is making you want to talk this much, you should treat it as an alarm, and pay close attention. (This helped me break some old habits, and I hope it helps you when you do get unbanned.) If you collapse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225484, you'll notice that there are 90 total comments underneath that tree. That's a flamewar. It also happens to be a political flamewar, which is the worst type for HN's goals. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30254810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30254810 has 24 comments. It's a flamewar; almost explicitly so: > More importantly, Neil Young has shown himself to be for censorship and against the free exchange of ideas. His stance is fundamentally at odds with free societies that harbor enlightenment values. These were the worst, but your comments are doing the equivalent of tossing around molotovs. It's no surprise that some of them start fires. When you do this repeatedly, it's the moderation team's duty to ban you. Again, people come here primarily for entertainment. You need to internalize this in order to experience a meaningful long-term change in behavior. I'm spending this much time talking with you because I sense that you're a thoughtful person. But when you care so much about politics, you need to channel those energies somewhere else. Twitter is a decent one; it's where I took refuge when I was banned. https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ too, when you want to talk about technical topics. Their stories often overlap HN's, and the crew there has unique perspectives relative to HN's audience. I like them a lot. If you're still not convinced... Remember that old cartoon Good Idea, Bad Idea? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9erKbsQW8C0&ab_channel=THEDUMP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9erKbsQW8C0&ab_channel=THEDU... Here are some examples of what it would frame as a Bad Idea on HN: - Picking a fight with Dan over moderation policies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225929 - Posting a comment saying Merriam Webster is among the worst dictionaries, because they're politically activist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225625 - Saying that GoFundMe's decision to pause donations to Canada truckers was due to government pressure, and calling it a "chilling and tyrannical suppression of the right to protest": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30200795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30200795 - Calling eviction bans an "unconstitutional seizure of private property": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30144862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30144862 I could go on and on, and I haven't even reached two weeks into your account history. But it's 3 am. The trouble is, it doesn't matter whether you're correct about the things that you're saying. I might even agree with you that eviction bans are interfering with property rights. But when you frame it as an "unconstitutional seizure of private property," that's an entirely different matter. At that point, the war drums are banging, and you're the drummer. Here's what I would recommend you do. First, internalize that if you're banned, no one will miss you. (They didn't miss me.) Second, decide whether you wish to participate on HN. (I did.) Third, read Dan's reply to you, ideally several times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30274971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30274971 Then read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (I just reviewed them myself, and learned that I was recently guilty of "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." So this is a good exercise.) Once you've internalized that HN is for curious conversation, start trying to have some. I recommend you restrict yourself to technical topics. Do this for at least one week. At the end of the week, email hn@ycombinator.com, link to those comments, and explain that you understand now that HN isn't meant for political flamewar and that you'll try (hard) not to fall back into your old habits. If you follow this recipe to a T, there's a good chance you'll be unbanned and happily HN'ing within a month. The truth is that you're lucky. You have a straightforward path towards becoming unbanned. Mine included not being able to post to the site at all, even while banned. Good luck. If you'd like to talk more extensively about this, you're always welcome to DM me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theshawwn https://twitter.com/theshawwn I'm happy to lend an ear and to keep you company while you're banned. The key is to just find a topic that makes you happy, and talk a lot about that. Mine turned out to be ML. It's difficult (though not impossible) to damage HN by nerding out about ML. And frankly, I don't miss the days when I was trying to talk about heated topics. Perhaps in a year or two you'll feel the same way.
- cmeacham98 5y ago
  I, for one, hope that HN never becomes this unmoderated hellscape many people seem to want it to be. HN has had moderators from day one. If you want a censorship-free forum those do exist - there are places on the internet that do the bare minimum of moderation and only remove illegal content. Unfortunately, only the worst members of society seem to frequent these types of forums, and that isn't a coincidence.
  - tpoacher 5y ago
    I don't know why you consider those two words to be synonyms. If anything, they are opposing concepts. You moderate a discussion exactly to prevent censorship. "Moderation" that results in censorship is censorship, not "moderation".
    - approxim8ion 5y ago
      > You moderate a discussion exactly to prevent censorship. No, you might moderate a discussion to prevent censorship but that is not the definition or even a necessary goal of moderation.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bliteben 5y ago
    The problem with shadow bans and most moderation is they basically all eventually just make the user's account have no voice at all and its not redeemable. Sure this helps with spam, but on a long enough time frame these types of systems would ban even their best users. In fighting spam and other abuse we take approaches that don't mirror real life at all, even the most rigid humans will forgive.
  - TheMonarchist 5y ago
    > there are places on the internet that do the bare minimum of moderation and only remove illegal content. Unfortunately, only the worst members of society seem to frequent these types of forums Could you link to worst examples? I think that finding these with search engines might be difficult.
- eternalban 5y ago
  Agreed - my last post. I am so livid learning that this is how HN works. And there is -no excuse- for this so called "dark pattern". Want to take away certain features, well just disable arrows for that user. And this also reminds of the completely opaque privacy position of this forum. Who are these 3rd parties, and what precisely do they get from YCombinator? - Ciao and thanks for the fish!
haswell 5y ago
For what it’s worth, this could also be a scaling thing, with upvotes taking longer to be processed in some queue somewhere.
- version_five 5y ago
  Yes I considered this, and I can't be sure without some "official" information. But I've played with it enough that I've convinced myself of it. I could create another account to compare, but it's not important. Eventually I'll start fresh from a new account and I'll confirm then that there is a difference.
iqanq 5y ago
You did not trigger anything, they take your privileges manually. But I don't know if it's permanent.
- krapp 5y ago
  AFAIK mod actions are always permanent unless you notice (they won't always tell you, and sometimes when they do, it's in a comment days or weeks back that you probably won't notice unless you manually review your entire comment history on a regular basis) and contact the mods and apologize, or the mods just happen to change their mind.
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
    I saw a clearly oblivious poster, who's been commenting quite regularly who has been [dead] since 2013. I couldn't see anything controversial in his history.
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      I'd love to see who you're taking about. I keep showdead on and sometimes look at the comments history of dead comments. I don't think I've ever seen a profile that left me guessing as to why they were banned.
      - throwawaysea 5y ago
        I’ll volunteer myself as an example, as I was recently shadow banned (or some variant of banned). My other comment in this discussion has some details. I don’t think I am particularly controversial but maybe you can share a different perspective.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - ungamedplayer 5y ago
      What does dead mean in this context.. I have one dead in my history iirc. Am I shadow banned?
FridayoLeary 5y ago
I just tested it now and i had no affect on your karma. I suspect it's only half- blocked (i.e sometimes works, sometimes doesn't) but i'm a little bit miffed, what with my high karma.
- commoner 5y ago
  I can confirm that I've upvoted your comment and did not see a change to your karma. However, when I upvote a submission and refresh the page, I always see the submission's points go up. I can't tell whether my comment votes are being ignored (or diminished or delayed) by HN, or if this is just the result of how HN tabulates points and karma. (I don't think comment/submission upvotes from users with less than 10 or 11 karma count at all.[1] This is also how I remembered it when I first joined HN.) Reddit uses a formula to transform upvotes into karma that awards less karma for each additional upvote.[2] I suspect that HN uses 1 or more similar formulas to transform (i) comment upvotes -> comment points, and/or (ii) comment points -> user karma. Since points and karma are only displayed as integers, the formula would sometimes prevent your comment upvote from visibly affecting the user's karma. I don't think HN uses a formula to convert submission upvotes -> submission points, though I could be wrong. On the other hand, we can easily verify that the submission points -> user karma transformation is not 1:1 by looking at a throwaway account that has only made 1 submission and no comments.[3] If dang could clarify what's going on, I would greatly appreciate it! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439396 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/e9c88r/update_2_i_found_a_formula_that_will_tell_you_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/e9c88r/upda... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=throwawaygoaway https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=throwawaygoaway (300 karma) / https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=throwawaygoaway https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=throwawaygoaway (911 points)
  - altairprime 5y ago
    If you email dang using the footer contact link, I imagine he’d appreciate the heads up that this post and your comment exists, so that a reply could be considered. Otherwise there’s every possibility it’ll be missed in the crowd.
junon 5y ago
Uh... nobody here is going to mention caching? This is clearly the effect of caching. Why would everyone here be shadow banned?
- Wiseacre 5y ago
  How do you know cached pages are being fetched? One would be shadowbanned for the same as reasons one is banned. Every large social media company does shadow banning.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  It’s not. My other accounts have been blocked this way too. It’s also in the original codebase.
shock 5y ago
I think I know when it happened to me: I vouched for a comment that I thought made a good logical argument, by a user who is perpetually shadow-banned (redis-something). That's a good lesson to not vouch anymore.
- ungamedplayer 5y ago
  I have learned from past experience that moderation and COC end up being used to push an agenda. If you don't agree with whatever that agenda is, leave the site quickly and find another community worth your time. Don't spend time on someone else's spilled milk.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

shock 5y ago

Same in my case. At the end of the day, it's just another form of censorship. It broke the illusion I had of HN being something special and I'm glad it did. Better spend that energy elsewhere.

version_five 5y ago
There is a shadow banned sibling post to this, which given the subject would be worth including. I did vouch but I don't think my votes count as I explained. If you turn on showdead in your settings, you can see the post and vouch for it
throwawaysea 5y ago
> At the end of the day, it's just another form of censorship. This is how I feel right now, since there doesn’t seem to be a good way to openly debate the policies (or dark patterns like shadow bans) once you become subject to actions taken under those policies. All you can do is appeal to the moderators by email. It’s something, but a private conversation isn’t the same as a community debate. And a community debate isn’t possible once you are silenced. I’m not sure what the right solution is. In my case, someone called me a nitwit and my response to them was deemed engaging in a flamewar even though I was mostly just clarifying my earlier comment/stance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30255599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30255599). And then upon further investigation from the moderator, I apparently didn’t have the right mix of topics I post on and was deemed to be engaging in ideological battle. It seems arbitrary to me because here are the topics I see in my recent comments: Canada protest, climate change, Neil Young, biometric identity verification, a tool to contact representatives, the Olympics, MacBook Pros, Google Slides, GoFundMe (I had many comments on this one admittedly), search engine results, Delta airline policy, compensation trends, cars, Microsoft Teams, mathematics, Roku spyware, and rent increases. So what is a well meaning user to do if they want to just engage on the stories most meaningful to them? Is it really a bad thing to post on topics that are controversial rather than straightforward? On the other hand, I am not sure what other community is better than HN, even if I dislike censorship. So maybe they’re doing something right and I’m on the wrong side of it after all.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Your comment caught my attention. I took a look. You're right that the exchange you linked to wasn't banworthy. But that exchange wasn't the problem. The fundamental problem is that you're not writing from a position of intellectual curiosity. But the real issue is that you're interfering with why people come to the site: to be entertained. Almost all moderation actions make sense when viewed through that lens, and it took many years to realize and accept this hard truth. People mostly aren't here for some sort of enlightenment, or to save the world, or to have their minds changed about politics. When you post here, you're broadcasting to millions of people, and around 50k of them see and engage with the top comments on a thread. That's the high level overview. Zooming back into your account, within the last week you've posted almost entirely on political topics. That's not necessarily a bad thing (but it's usually a bad sign). The issue is that you have to frame these topics in a very delicate, substantive (double underscores on "substantive") way. In the "Florida governor to investigate GoFundMe" thread, you spawned ten different subthreads. In the future, when you sense a topic is making you want to talk this much, you should treat it as an alarm, and pay close attention. (This helped me break some old habits, and I hope it helps you when you do get unbanned.) If you collapse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225484, you'll notice that there are 90 total comments underneath that tree. That's a flamewar. It also happens to be a political flamewar, which is the worst type for HN's goals. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30254810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30254810 has 24 comments. It's a flamewar; almost explicitly so: > More importantly, Neil Young has shown himself to be for censorship and against the free exchange of ideas. His stance is fundamentally at odds with free societies that harbor enlightenment values. These were the worst, but your comments are doing the equivalent of tossing around molotovs. It's no surprise that some of them start fires. When you do this repeatedly, it's the moderation team's duty to ban you. Again, people come here primarily for entertainment. You need to internalize this in order to experience a meaningful long-term change in behavior. I'm spending this much time talking with you because I sense that you're a thoughtful person. But when you care so much about politics, you need to channel those energies somewhere else. Twitter is a decent one; it's where I took refuge when I was banned. https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ too, when you want to talk about technical topics. Their stories often overlap HN's, and the crew there has unique perspectives relative to HN's audience. I like them a lot. If you're still not convinced... Remember that old cartoon Good Idea, Bad Idea? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9erKbsQW8C0&ab_channel=THEDUMP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9erKbsQW8C0&ab_channel=THEDU... Here are some examples of what it would frame as a Bad Idea on HN: - Picking a fight with Dan over moderation policies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225929 - Posting a comment saying Merriam Webster is among the worst dictionaries, because they're politically activist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225625 - Saying that GoFundMe's decision to pause donations to Canada truckers was due to government pressure, and calling it a "chilling and tyrannical suppression of the right to protest": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30200795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30200795 - Calling eviction bans an "unconstitutional seizure of private property": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30144862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30144862 I could go on and on, and I haven't even reached two weeks into your account history. But it's 3 am. The trouble is, it doesn't matter whether you're correct about the things that you're saying. I might even agree with you that eviction bans are interfering with property rights. But when you frame it as an "unconstitutional seizure of private property," that's an entirely different matter. At that point, the war drums are banging, and you're the drummer. Here's what I would recommend you do. First, internalize that if you're banned, no one will miss you. (They didn't miss me.) Second, decide whether you wish to participate on HN. (I did.) Third, read Dan's reply to you, ideally several times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30274971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30274971 Then read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (I just reviewed them myself, and learned that I was recently guilty of "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." So this is a good exercise.) Once you've internalized that HN is for curious conversation, start trying to have some. I recommend you restrict yourself to technical topics. Do this for at least one week. At the end of the week, email hn@ycombinator.com, link to those comments, and explain that you understand now that HN isn't meant for political flamewar and that you'll try (hard) not to fall back into your old habits. If you follow this recipe to a T, there's a good chance you'll be unbanned and happily HN'ing within a month. The truth is that you're lucky. You have a straightforward path towards becoming unbanned. Mine included not being able to post to the site at all, even while banned. Good luck. If you'd like to talk more extensively about this, you're always welcome to DM me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theshawwn https://twitter.com/theshawwn I'm happy to lend an ear and to keep you company while you're banned. The key is to just find a topic that makes you happy, and talk a lot about that. Mine turned out to be ML. It's difficult (though not impossible) to damage HN by nerding out about ML. And frankly, I don't miss the days when I was trying to talk about heated topics. Perhaps in a year or two you'll feel the same way.
cmeacham98 5y ago
I, for one, hope that HN never becomes this unmoderated hellscape many people seem to want it to be. HN has had moderators from day one. If you want a censorship-free forum those do exist - there are places on the internet that do the bare minimum of moderation and only remove illegal content. Unfortunately, only the worst members of society seem to frequent these types of forums, and that isn't a coincidence.
- tpoacher 5y ago
  I don't know why you consider those two words to be synonyms. If anything, they are opposing concepts. You moderate a discussion exactly to prevent censorship. "Moderation" that results in censorship is censorship, not "moderation".
  - approxim8ion 5y ago
    > You moderate a discussion exactly to prevent censorship. No, you might moderate a discussion to prevent censorship but that is not the definition or even a necessary goal of moderation.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bliteben 5y ago
  The problem with shadow bans and most moderation is they basically all eventually just make the user's account have no voice at all and its not redeemable. Sure this helps with spam, but on a long enough time frame these types of systems would ban even their best users. In fighting spam and other abuse we take approaches that don't mirror real life at all, even the most rigid humans will forgive.
- TheMonarchist 5y ago
  > there are places on the internet that do the bare minimum of moderation and only remove illegal content. Unfortunately, only the worst members of society seem to frequent these types of forums Could you link to worst examples? I think that finding these with search engines might be difficult.
eternalban 5y ago
Agreed - my last post. I am so livid learning that this is how HN works. And there is -no excuse- for this so called "dark pattern". Want to take away certain features, well just disable arrows for that user. And this also reminds of the completely opaque privacy position of this forum. Who are these 3rd parties, and what precisely do they get from YCombinator? - Ciao and thanks for the fish!

haswell 5y ago

For what it’s worth, this could also be a scaling thing, with upvotes taking longer to be processed in some queue somewhere.

version_five 5y ago
Yes I considered this, and I can't be sure without some "official" information. But I've played with it enough that I've convinced myself of it. I could create another account to compare, but it's not important. Eventually I'll start fresh from a new account and I'll confirm then that there is a difference.

iqanq 5y ago

You did not trigger anything, they take your privileges manually. But I don't know if it's permanent.

krapp 5y ago
AFAIK mod actions are always permanent unless you notice (they won't always tell you, and sometimes when they do, it's in a comment days or weeks back that you probably won't notice unless you manually review your entire comment history on a regular basis) and contact the mods and apologize, or the mods just happen to change their mind.
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  I saw a clearly oblivious poster, who's been commenting quite regularly who has been [dead] since 2013. I couldn't see anything controversial in his history.
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    I'd love to see who you're taking about. I keep showdead on and sometimes look at the comments history of dead comments. I don't think I've ever seen a profile that left me guessing as to why they were banned.
    - throwawaysea 5y ago
      I’ll volunteer myself as an example, as I was recently shadow banned (or some variant of banned). My other comment in this discussion has some details. I don’t think I am particularly controversial but maybe you can share a different perspective.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - ungamedplayer 5y ago
    What does dead mean in this context.. I have one dead in my history iirc. Am I shadow banned?

FridayoLeary 5y ago

I just tested it now and i had no affect on your karma. I suspect it's only half- blocked (i.e sometimes works, sometimes doesn't) but i'm a little bit miffed, what with my high karma.

commoner 5y ago
I can confirm that I've upvoted your comment and did not see a change to your karma. However, when I upvote a submission and refresh the page, I always see the submission's points go up. I can't tell whether my comment votes are being ignored (or diminished or delayed) by HN, or if this is just the result of how HN tabulates points and karma. (I don't think comment/submission upvotes from users with less than 10 or 11 karma count at all.[1] This is also how I remembered it when I first joined HN.) Reddit uses a formula to transform upvotes into karma that awards less karma for each additional upvote.[2] I suspect that HN uses 1 or more similar formulas to transform (i) comment upvotes -> comment points, and/or (ii) comment points -> user karma. Since points and karma are only displayed as integers, the formula would sometimes prevent your comment upvote from visibly affecting the user's karma. I don't think HN uses a formula to convert submission upvotes -> submission points, though I could be wrong. On the other hand, we can easily verify that the submission points -> user karma transformation is not 1:1 by looking at a throwaway account that has only made 1 submission and no comments.[3] If dang could clarify what's going on, I would greatly appreciate it! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439396 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/e9c88r/update_2_i_found_a_formula_that_will_tell_you_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/e9c88r/upda... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=throwawaygoaway https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=throwawaygoaway (300 karma) / https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=throwawaygoaway https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=throwawaygoaway (911 points)
- altairprime 5y ago
  If you email dang using the footer contact link, I imagine he’d appreciate the heads up that this post and your comment exists, so that a reply could be considered. Otherwise there’s every possibility it’ll be missed in the crowd.

junon 5y ago

Uh... nobody here is going to mention caching? This is clearly the effect of caching. Why would everyone here be shadow banned?

Wiseacre 5y ago
How do you know cached pages are being fetched? One would be shadowbanned for the same as reasons one is banned. Every large social media company does shadow banning.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
It’s not. My other accounts have been blocked this way too. It’s also in the original codebase.

shock 5y ago

I think I know when it happened to me: I vouched for a comment that I thought made a good logical argument, by a user who is perpetually shadow-banned (redis-something). That's a good lesson to not vouch anymore.

ungamedplayer 5y ago
I have learned from past experience that moderation and COC end up being used to push an agenda. If you don't agree with whatever that agenda is, leave the site quickly and find another community worth your time. Don't spend time on someone else's spilled milk.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]