Shadowbanning has two obvious benefits for the site:

1) Increases the time it takes trolls to realize they need to create a new account.

2) Pacifies angry, malicious users who might escalate their bad behavior when instantly banned.

I haven't seen HN use shadowbanning to censor anyone. The people who are shadowbanned all seem to post unhinged, profane, off-topic, content-free rants.

Personally, I think it makes the community better. If you find it slimy and cowardly, perhaps you should vote with your feet and visit other communities instead. There are millions of other message boards.

It’s extremely effective and reduce the moderators workload a lot, because creating a new account and farming karma again is easy. However many spammers and unwanted commenters never notice that they are ghost banned.

I agree that it’s not nice to them, which is acceptable most of the time for most people because the ghost banned members are not really nice community members. It is an issue when someone is ghost banned for bad reasons or a bit too fast.

I can see the thinking behind it. Why let a spammer know no-one is seeing their junk? They'll just keep creating new accounts.

But having been on the end of it myself with other accounts here -just for disagreeing with people who were obviously more 'in with the in crowd' than me- and without even receiving any warning first, I think the way it is sometimes implemented is pretty childish.

  > We're all big boys and girls.

But here is the thing: @dang is trying to keep peace and order. He is not trying to be evil or nice. He is "managing" us. Literally. And this path of the least resistance seems to be working fine-ish.

Personally, I hate having a great article be "flagged" or immediately down-voted. It is more worrisome that posting a similar article some hours later will make it into the top 10 for the same unfathomable reasons. It appears that being up or down voted is more or less emergent (and random?), and that saddens me a bit.

That this post is [flagged] is of course deliciously ironic.

I agree.

It's one thing to shadow-ban an obvious troll.

The problem is, just like censorship, where do you stop?

For example, I'm an infrequent commenter on Youtube, and then mostly perfectly agreeable, but just this one time I posted a scathing comment on a video. And just this one comment was shadow-banned, I'm guessing at the request of the video author. I tried to show my comment to a friend, and the comment simply did not exist for them, or for several other accounts.

I find this kind of selective ghosting, 'invisibly' deleting any critical comments, to be extremely pernicious.

Shadow banning is the dumbest, it's so cowardly

If you ban and censor us, why don't you just tell us so?

Because you'll just make a new account.

It's worse in videogames like Dark Souls or mobile PUBG where they simply send you off to the shadowrealm of "like-minded" players. And there's no going back. It's a sign of understaffed moderation teams.

This is why I always read HN with Show Dead turned on. Often, dead comments are the most interesting and thought-provoking in a thread.

> We're all big boys and girls

Clearly.