2 ms·

I've seen dang warn people their conduct is bannable many times. AFAIK shadowbanning on HN means your comments default to "dead", as if they had been flagged.

I've seen dang warn people their conduct is bannable many times. AFAIK shadowbanning on HN means your comments default to "dead", as if they had been flagged. You can see them if you enable "showdead" in your profile, and if people vouch for them, they can become visible again. See Terry Davis' comment history for examples (this is the only shadowbanned account I know of): https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis - if you look a few pages in, you'll see some live comments of him talking about the early days of Ticketmaster and such. To me this seems like a better solution than simply kicking people out who are unable to uphold the minimum guidelines necessary to engage in reasonably civil discourse. What would you suggest as an alternative?

account42 4y ago
The crucial part of shadowbanning is that the one subjected to it is can't (easily) see that their comments/post are being hidden from others. It's like the difference between rejecting spam mail and silently dropping it. Since actual shadowbanning is all about showing a different view of the world to the affected user compared to everyone else we can't see if TerryADavis has been shadowbanned or not. Shadowbanning might be effective against actual spammers but preventing the user from seeing that they were banned removes even more accountability from the moderation than other tools which makes shadowbanning particularly prone to abuse as well as mistakes that won't get fixed. I think it's pretty dishonest to punish someone without telling them they are being punished. It's also worth pointing out that shadowbanning is more effective against good faith users than malicious users since all it takes is to check using a disconnected session to uncover the ruse - something that will hardly be difficult for a motivated malicious user.
- maxbond 4y ago
  I've never been shadowbanned on HN but afaik you will see that your comments are flagged. I would disagree with the form of banning you are describing, however.

account42 4y ago

The crucial part of shadowbanning is that the one subjected to it is can't (easily) see that their comments/post are being hidden from others. It's like the difference between rejecting spam mail and silently dropping it. Since actual shadowbanning is all about showing a different view of the world to the affected user compared to everyone else we can't see if TerryADavis has been shadowbanned or not. Shadowbanning might be effective against actual spammers but preventing the user from seeing that they were banned removes even more accountability from the moderation than other tools which makes shadowbanning particularly prone to abuse as well as mistakes that won't get fixed. I think it's pretty dishonest to punish someone without telling them they are being punished. It's also worth pointing out that shadowbanning is more effective against good faith users than malicious users since all it takes is to check using a disconnected session to uncover the ruse - something that will hardly be difficult for a motivated malicious user.

maxbond 4y ago
I've never been shadowbanned on HN but afaik you will see that your comments are flagged. I would disagree with the form of banning you are describing, however.