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Just weighing in as someone who has submitted next to nothing, but also who dislikes dark patterns generally. I don't think this is the sort of situation where

Just weighing in as someone who has submitted next to nothing, but also who dislikes dark patterns generally. I don't think this is the sort of situation where hiding the reality of what has happened makes sense (point 2). If your spamming HN you probably have the smarts to also automate checking if your spam account has been banned (shadow or otherwise) by also automating a check that loads HN when not logged in. I personally, don't see the point in hiding this from a submitting user. I wouldn't like it if it happened to me, and I wouldn't expect it to be an effective technical countermeasure to much spam (though I concede there may be evidence to the contrary on this that represents fact instead of my opinions) As to point 1, I don't know how hard it would be to expose some of the information. I don't expect the moderation team (hi dang! keep being so awesome!, this isn't even sarcastic, what you manage to do genuinely awes me, I know I couldn't manage to moderate HN.) to have the time to post individual comments about every ban, but it does feel like something that could perhaps be made less opaque. If you know it was banned/auto-dead due to a specific rule, then thats better than just having no idea. With that information I know I would feel slightly less intimidated asking hn@ycombinator.com in an email why my submission was dead/banned, that email goes from "why my did you block my thing" to "I see my submission ran into this rule that has nothing to do with me personally, I just thought it was cool and wanted to either know why, or if my cool thing could get given a second chance" ... which feels a lot less confrontational to me. I try to think about the "ops burden" with this sort of thing, there may be good reasons why things ended up the way they are, but that doesn't mean things couldn't improve and so its at least worth the discussion from time to time like this, even if the original reasons hold and for whatever reason, the current behaviour is still the optimal one for now.

dang 4y ago
> If your spamming HN you probably have the smarts to also automate checking if your spam account has been banned (shadow or otherwise) by also automating a check that loads HN when not logged in. That's very far from the case. It's still an effective, indeed indispensable countermeasure. Without it HN (or at least /newest) would be overrun with spam. A minority figure it out and email us, and then we explain to them what happened. Sometimes they promise to change their behavior and we unban them. Sometimes I ask them first to send an example of an article they would like to post that they think is substantive and on topic for HN. Then, oftentimes, I have to find a polite way to explain to them that it's still spam. Usually that's something like "our readers are looking for something else; it's not in your interest to post this sort of article because they will flag it and use unkind words like 'spam'". I hate having to answer those emails because I hate having to reject people (or rather their work) over and over again, but I do it on the principle that every sincere inquiry deserves a response. Dropping shadowbanning for spam would massively increase those emails. That would probably break me.
- techdragon 4y ago
  Makes sense then. If I’ve underestimated how low effort the spam attempts are, then it stands to reason that much of my subsequent thinking isn’t applicable. Thanks for taking the time to share this dang. It’s a little peek at the “ops burden” I was talking about and it makes it much more clear why the current shadow banning is needed to make the workload sustainable.

dang 4y ago

> If your spamming HN you probably have the smarts to also automate checking if your spam account has been banned (shadow or otherwise) by also automating a check that loads HN when not logged in. That's very far from the case. It's still an effective, indeed indispensable countermeasure. Without it HN (or at least /newest) would be overrun with spam. A minority figure it out and email us, and then we explain to them what happened. Sometimes they promise to change their behavior and we unban them. Sometimes I ask them first to send an example of an article they would like to post that they think is substantive and on topic for HN. Then, oftentimes, I have to find a polite way to explain to them that it's still spam. Usually that's something like "our readers are looking for something else; it's not in your interest to post this sort of article because they will flag it and use unkind words like 'spam'". I hate having to answer those emails because I hate having to reject people (or rather their work) over and over again, but I do it on the principle that every sincere inquiry deserves a response. Dropping shadowbanning for spam would massively increase those emails. That would probably break me.

techdragon 4y ago
Makes sense then. If I’ve underestimated how low effort the spam attempts are, then it stands to reason that much of my subsequent thinking isn’t applicable. Thanks for taking the time to share this dang. It’s a little peek at the “ops burden” I was talking about and it makes it much more clear why the current shadow banning is needed to make the workload sustainable.