I had a similar experience to yours. Lurker for 90% of the time, only comment here and there and never spammed linked unless they were pertinent to the discussi

I had a similar experience to yours. Lurker for 90% of the time, only comment here and there and never spammed linked unless they were pertinent to the discussion I was commenting on. At some point I got shadowbanned and I only noticed because no one ever replied or interacted with any of my comments. It was easily solved with an email to dang asking if there was a reason why that happened. If I broke a rule, I obviously want to know because I do care about following guidelines here. It got quickly resolved and that was a very pleasing experience. But that's because I was able to ask questions to a human and a human took time to answer them. I still think shadowbanning is a good tool and a necessary one when it comes to moderation, especially because contrary to the real world, here and on most online comunities, anyone can join. IRL no random person can just join your friends circle and become part of the conversation. This is an almost exlusively online issue and all the various forms of banning are the only tools at our disposal to deal with the issue. And letting people think they're part of the comunity while preventing them to do harm is a good compromise. I'll wait for the day when a clever dev decides to use GPT to make a bot whose sole purpose is to engage with shadowbanned account.