Looking at Hackernews, some people create accounts solely to promote their own websites, but do not interact or care about the community in other ways. You coul

Looking at Hackernews, some people create accounts solely to promote their own websites, but do not interact or care about the community in other ways. You could call this spam, but I don't think most of the posters think of themselves as being spammers. Still, their presence brings the average quality of the site down. From what I understand, HN typically shadowbans these people from submitting links to their own website, but does not silence them in other ways. They can still share their views and be heard, just not for self-promotion. It might seem like a good idea to tell them this up-front, but keep in mind that most of them do not care about the community, and the ones that do care more about their own self-promotion than HN. If you tell them that they're banned for not participating, do you really expect them to do a good job all of a sudden? Chances are they'll just post low-effort fascimile comments in an attempt to blend in. Keep in mind these are not spambots. Nobody is trying to be malevolent. But working with these people isn't always a worthwhile effort. For a concrete example, I recall r/tabletopgamedesign having a problem of self-promotion (and I was part of the problem!). Lots of the users there post to promote their own board-game business venture. The mods tell them this isn't allowed without participating, so they instead post low-effort comments and self-insert their content when possible. e.g. if you ask them how to do something, they'll start with "Well, when designing (INSERT PERSONAL BUSINESS), I took (APPROACH) and found that (BLAH BLAH). You can read more (AT MY WEBSITE)". This drops the overall quality of conversation. Regarding my second point, someone like Terry Davis is a prime example. Terry liked to post nonsense in threads because of his schizophrenia. He was banned several times, but would always come back with new accounts. Shadowbanning him seemed to be the ideal solution, as he was content with writing comments that would not be seen. Unlike the self-promotion people, he was not trying to be heard. Rather, he was trying to speak, and did not want that taken away from him. It's no different than those crackpots who write pages and pages on their own personal homepages that nobody reads [1][2]. They just wanna write. [1] https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Creed_Thoughts https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Creed_Thoughts [2] https://timecube.2enp.com/ https://timecube.2enp.com/