I recall vBulletin 3 software having a mode to specifically make the website slow and frustrating for certain users.

https://www.managingcommunities.com/2009/09/14/troll-hack-gl...

"miserable" mode. It was a mod introduced in vbulletin 2 by community members.

When installed it extended the idea of banning or shadow banning as it degraded the user experience for the person in question. Basically giving the impression that the site was malfunctioning to the point that it was frustrating for the user and they left the site for a while. This included random delays to the page loading, and sending them to a different page and ignoring their intent.

https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=93258

I believe Hacker News does this too (disclaimer: I have never experienced this firsthand, and the people I hear it from are obviously not impartial sources).

I’ve experienced this. If you are downvoted in quick succession you will get a “you are posting too quickly” error if you try to reply to anything… even if you didn’t post anything except the original post. Seems to last about a day.

I think that's just the standard rate-limiting; there is supposedly also a thing where Hacker News will throttle the connection as well.

They did that to me years ago, like ten years or so. Took me weeks to figure out the site wasn't slow when logged out! They don't do it anymore (and thankfully, because if they did it to me now I'd slowloris the hell out of this site).

> I'd slowloris the hell out of this site

I think most people who have the technical skill to do this effectively don't telegraph their intentions on what is, to all intents and purposes, social media.

I said they don't do it anymore. I'm not telegraphing any intentions. It would be like saying I'll shoplift in a store that no longer exists.

But saying people don't broadcast their criminal intentions on social media... I'm sure that's more common than you think :P

That's rate limiting. This is enabled on accounts if you ever post something "controversial". Shadow banning, where the site lets you think you are posting successfully, has definitely been used in the past on this site and probably still is.

Shadow banning isn’t really something used in private messages, no?

WeChat does it (as well) [0].

[0] https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/wechat-surveillance-explained/

Facebook is doing this for a while. Pretty sure they always checked privately sent links. Some years ago I sent a .tk domain to a few friends and it got shadow banner after a few minutes (it was a harmless meme site).

Hackernews does shadowbanning as well.

It was done at the unnamed social network I worked at, over 10 years ago.

To combat spam, mostly. People posting links to scam sites to watch sports games.

When faced with software/malware that was appending links to user's instant messages back in 2005, back-end code to silently drop the user's messages was put in place. This was a messaging service that had ~200 million users.

Apparently by Facebook.