In the tweet text it says "all new users start out shadowbanned until enough of their post get approved for rightthink by their user moderators"

Did they provide any evidence of that, or was it just editorializing? It's not uncommon for new users to start out with limited privileges on some platforms for spam and fraud prevention reasons.

It might just be editorializing. Perhaps the community is self-selecting enough that censorship isn't needed. Regardless, it's not "moderation-free"

Hackernews starts you off shadowbanned too. It’s a way to ward off spammers and bots. I know because this account started off shadow banned for 1-2 weeks until I had made 5-10 posts. Edit: Why in earth is this getting downvoted so heavily? Every new account everyone I know ever made was shadow banned at first

HN doesn't start users shadow banned - just look for the green new-account usernames. Your account didn't start shadow banned either. Here's your first comment, visible to all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25410162

New accounts are more likely to get shadow banned, especially if they post many comments with links or post inflammatory remarks.

Hacker News does start off many people with a shadowban–I know because I have vouched for many of these initial comments.

I have vouched for dead initial comments too, but usually there was a clear reason they were like that, like a link.

I believe that happens when HN suspects the account is from a person who was banned previously, based on IP's and/or some other heuristic. I've seen dang say something like "If you create new accounts to break the guidelines, eventually we just start banning your new accounts."

Perhaps! It might be that these people were unfortunate to share a network with someone malicious (maybe a university, or a company) and this dooms their initial comments.

Is it really a shadowban if you could vouch for them? Shadowban is when the poster sees their stuff looking normal and no-one else (modulo mods) sees it at all right?

By default, nobody sees those comments–you have to go to showdead in your profile to enable it. I keep it on because it gives me occasional insight into the dregs of the site and the effort that goes into moderating it, but also lets me save the insightful comments that get killed (or, very rarely, erroneously flagged.)

Right, I showdead for similar reasons. I figured that shadowbanning would prevent even showdead from revealing those comments, but apparently not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686672

I don’t think there is an actual “shadowbanned” on Hacker News, I’ve just seen various stages of banned/flagged/dead users. I mean, I guess I wouldn’t know if there was, but I’ve never heard anyone mention it so…

That's what I thought too, that it was just regular banning. But 'dang says shadowban, and [1] implies he does mean the type where the user doesn't know.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790627

When you make a new account and view a thread You post in for the first week to so, gour comments are absent absent unless you are logged in. That’s what a shadow ban is. It can be removed and it happens to every new hn account I’ve ever seen. It gets removed after a week or so. That “inflammatory” post about a game prototype you linked was not visible for even a second in that thread until a week or two had passed

I never claimed your post was inflammatory. It does, however, contain a link. What the link is to doesn't matter, but accounts that post links in their first comments are likely to be automatically tagged as spam, which I'm guessing is what happened to you. It doesn't happen to all HN accounts, as you can see by all the brand-new green accounts posting in political threads lately.

Because it's wrong, new accounts absolutely do not get shadowbanned. People make burner accounts for 2-3 anonymous posts all the time.

Is there a legal reason to have defamation up there? It seems like a pretty funny one to have for a free speech platform - the others are more understandable.

Defamation is not free speech, it's illegal.

Defamation posted to Parler by users was not illegal for Parler to host. Section 230 covers them there. I'd expect a "free speech" site to allow it.

Section 230 does not protect the network from illegal speech.

Edit: assuming there’s a federal law about it. Not sure how civil litigation is handled. Not a lawyer, etc.

So it's just there to cover bases then? It's basically impossible to win a defamation case when the subject is a public person no?

A public person needs to prove it was malicious and caused damages, but the rule is likely to prevent harassment of private people on the platform.