> Hacker News does shadowbans too which I am not happy about, but that's another story.

We almost never do that anymore except in cases of spammers or new accounts that appear to be trolling, i.e. the cases where telling people you banned them tends to be problematic. Apart from those, we almost always post a comment in the thread saying that we banned the account.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&date...

I have noticed those comments recently and they are much of an improvement. :)

I don't see anything that I would describe as "spamming" in that account's history. I can't say what the feature was meant for, but we can see how it's been used.

If you mean the overview screenshot in the article, keep in mind that there is no timestamp on that screenshot. It's possible that the submissions by that user between when the screenshot was taken and the shadowbox may be more questionable.

They changes their tactics now https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit/comments/1083516