Its almost certainly an anti spam system. The system marked the review as spam, for whatever reason. And it doesn't publish the results. The system doesn't tell you this because otherwise the first thing you will do is keep trying again in different ways until it doesn't tell you it was marked as spam.

Google drops reviews for a few known reasons. When a location gets negative coverage in the news, thousands of negative reviews from people who have never visited the location. Google then drops the reviews since review bombing is not useful.

Who knows why OPs comment was flagged, but its easy to see how this happens without a big conspiracy going on.

Yes, in fact, if there's some delay in processing reviews through the anti-spam system, the OP might have triggered the failure themselves by then posting the exact same review under another (their wife's) account. If I'm writing an anti-spam system, duplicate reviews from different accounts are like the most obvious heuristic imaginable.

Right, but you don't accidentally shadow-ban someone, you first have to create the whole system to do so... So they weren't 'stupid'.

It obviously was intentional to lie to the user. We're just discussing the line at which intentional lies for selfish reasons can be called malicious.

> but you don't accidentally shadow-ban someone

Have you considered when the shadow-ban is triggered by an automated moderation system based on heuristics or ML which Google is known to use prolifically across their product range?

But not "accidental" because they had to create and maintain it. Stupid would be them intending but failing to make post visible.

They intentionally created a system which resulted in a user being unintentionally shadow-banned. Creating a shadow-banning system isn't malicious. Creating a shadow-banning system that accidentally shadow-bans legitimate users is pretty obviously more a case of stupidity than malice. Just because they created the system intentionally, doesn't mean unintended behaviours in the system are intentional malice

The maliciousness comes in with the self-interest. They're lying to you because they make more money when you don't know to complain.

They aren't like baby killers or anything, but they are certainly prioritizing their wallet over your consumer good and even safety.

Imagine if HN charged to post and shadow-banned users.