That defeats the entire point of shadowbanning someone. Shadowbanning is used primarily _because_ it is opaque to the person who is banned. If you told them, they might then make a new account, rather than thinking that people aren't engaging with them and moving on. If you give them a notification that they have been banned and why in the interest of transparency, its no longer a shadowban.

Or, maybe the first ban shouldn't be a permanent shadowban. Maybe actually telling people what they're doing wrong would get them to not do it.

There is, in fact, research showing that this is how it works on Reddit: users who get told why they're being banned or their post removed go on to be better contributors than those who don't. I can dig up the paper if you're interested, but I don't have it on hand.

I 100% agree, and think that in general shadowbans are a gross idea. But my point is that if you send out info about why you banned someone, then you are explicitly not shadowbanning them, by definition. The whole concept of a shadowban is that it must be opaque to the person being banned; if you change that then you aren't shadowbanning them.

Personally, I think that moderation transparency is a noble goal: I'd be in favor of all forums keeping explicit, public moderation logs with all moderator actions. But then again I have never had to moderate a particularly large forum, so perhaps my opinion would change when forced to deal with the same spammers, day after day.

I don't disagree with shadowbanning as a concept; rather, I disagree with HN's implementation of it. Being shadowbanned should be a last resort, after a warning and a more transparent ban. Once you've gotten a certain amount of strikes within a certain period, then I have no problem with a shadowban.

I agree with you on moderator transparency. There should be a certain amount of it visible to all, and that amount should definitely be more than what's available here on HN and Reddit.

Reddit is far worse, because you can be banned for arbitrary things without recourse, even though it's theoretically against the site moderation guidelines. You can be banned from one subreddit simply for participating in another.

I don't think HN has the same degree of problem, but I think the solution is the same. Sometimes, sunlight really is the best disinfectant.

We tell people that we're banning them, and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - but only once the account has an established history. We treat new accounts differently, for reasons I've explained before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288858

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666742

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20289994

It's a bimodal distribution. With established accounts, we warn them before banning, usually several times, and then tell them we're banning them and why. With new accounts, we don't say we're banning, because banned-new-accounts are overwhelmingly spammers and trolls—often serial trolls who have been banned many times and know exactly what they're doing. The cost-benefit of explaining why we're banning the account in those cases is completely different. To repeat from one of the comments I just linked to:

it is a balance between transparency and defending the site against abuse. If we tried to give every banned account the same high-effort attention that we give established users, we'd do nothing else all day and still not get through them all. That would just be a new vector for people to DoS the moderators. A small number of abusive users can create a large number of disruptions. There is also a significant amount of spam, and if we told spammers we were banning them, they would spam us with emails demanding attention, asking why, and telling us how high-quality their articles really are. Actually they do this a lot already, and it's a pain.

This does leave one class of accounts who unfortunately are the losers in this cat-and-mouse game: new accounts that get shadowbanned even though they were neither spammers nor trolls. It sounds like that is what happened in your case. Sometimes a new account shows up, and in its first post(s) behaves like a spammer or a troll would. That's when we use shadowbanning, but since we don't see the future, later it sometimes turns out to be a legit user who goes on to make good posts that get killed because we banned them.

This happens and it sucks. We can't see into the account's future posts, nor can we ever know for sure that an account is spamming or trolling...it's all just pattern matching and sometimes a pattern matches on the early data points and diverges later on. The only solution I know of in such cases is to correct it later: either because we notice good comments that are [dead] and investigate, or because we hear from other users "hey, are you sure $username should be banned"? - and we look them up, see the mistake and unban them. It's particularly helpful to alert us to such cases, so if anyone notices an account that is banned and shouldn't be, we'd greatly appreciate hearing about it at [email protected].