HACKER Q&A
📣 behnamoh

Do you agree with HN's shadow banning certain submissions?


I have experienced this a few times. Just recently, I submitted an interesting article as follows:

https://analyticsindiamag.com/gpt-3-is-quietly-damaging-google-search/

But HN automatically "dead"s the article, and there's no option to "discuss" it. The worst part? I can see the article on my end, but when logged out, HN doesn't even show the article on my profile.

I think there are two problems here:

1) HN — much like many companies that are discussed here — doesn't tell me __why__ my submission was banned/dead immediately.

2) HN tries to not hurt my feelings by showing the dead article on my profile without tagging it as "dead" or "flagged", but it is actually quite disappointing to see this.

  👤 mindcrime Accepted Answer ✓
It's not hard to figure out why. Just look here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=analyticsindiamag.com

It's obviously the domain that's at issue, not you. And the reason the domain is apparently blacklisted is most likely because the mods judged a previously seen pattern of incredibly frequent submissions by a very small group of users to be spam. I mean, I'm just guessing as I'm not part of YC or anything, but based on past comments by the various principals here, and extrapolating a little bit, it seems pretty straightforward.

But if you really want to know, I'd say go with what the guidelines[1] say:

Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Send it to hn@ycombinator.com.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

👤 r721
It looks like this domain was submitted by spammers before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aimmeghna

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Leemarose

("showdead" setting should be set to yes, as all their posts are marked as "[dead]")

👤 techdragon
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.

👤 unknownaccount
They also shadowban your whole account from posting submissions entirely. After posting a controversial story about the former world chess champion being tortured in an American jail I am not allowed to post any link anymore period.
👤 superchroma
It's definitely not the system I would build. There are certainly valid anti-spam concerns, but I think shadowbans aren't an accessible or appropriate way to go about addressing these concerns, and, based on the anecdotes I've seen, this approach affects a number of legitimate users. Additionally, I see a lot of throwaway accounts, which doesn't inspire confidence in the system as it is.