there's the confusion (unaware or intentional) between 'getting actually shadowbanned, as in, your posts actually do not appear to anyone else but you' and 'not getting free promo, free algo boost, free views from the platform, if it either doesn't choose to promote you, or chooses to not promote you' (these two are subtle but different as well). 'not getting the extra boost from a platform' - or just really 'having a piece of content fare for what it is, just by itself'. these kinds of mixups lead to kinda inane takes like 'i'm not getting as many views -> the platform has shadowbanned me', which are particularly weird to actually see, as a post, that is very much up and visible (and not "shadowbanned").
there's almost a vague sense of entitlement to getting views, getting an audience from a platform, in bulk and for free, and for whatever it may be. when a platform really just may choose to not extraneously promote something. or have a more sophisticated way by which some piece of content 'bubbles up', as it gets engagement and moves up in ranks of reach and virality. or it may downrank something, which still isn't a "shadowban". but lo and behold, "shadowbanning" now has its meaning so diluted, you'll just get talking heads throwing it around, and very visibly so - almost as if they're unencumbered by it and just saying a buzzy word.
"Well, the algorithm just isn't promoting you, that's not the same thing."
The algorithm is sorting a feed containing millions of posts. There is no mathematical difference between a penalty and the removal of a bonus that similarly situated accounts get, they both cause your posts to be not seen by people who would otherwise have seen it. You can easily be blocked from 95% of your audience and still be able to find people in the last 5% who occasionally see your posts.
The thing that makes it a shadowban is that it's a hidden penalty applied to your account, regardless of what you subsequently post or how the people who do see it respond to it.
no, a platform not promoting posts, and a platform hiding posts and making them not visible to anyone else at all, are not the same thing.
see, it's going as far with complaints about "shadowbanning" as to say "well maaaybe 5% might see it - But it's still a shadowban!" - that's the part that makes the complaints sound like bullshit that they are
How is it not shadowbanning? They're not showing your posts to people they would otherwise show your posts to because of an opaque penalty tag on your account. This can obviously be done to varying degrees ranging from not putting your posts in anyone else's feed, to not showing your replies even when viewing the post it's a direct reply to, to not notifying the person you replied to that they have a new reply because it was you who posted it.
These are all forms of shadowbanning. Meanwhile a given post might still be visible via some other means even when they're being applied.
> no, a platform not promoting posts, and a platform hiding posts and making them not visible to anyone else at all, are not the same thing.
This is some kind of pedantic reasoning where if you hide a post from very nearly everyone you want to call it something else because "very nearly everyone" and "everyone" theoretically isn't the same thing even if it's practically the same thing. It's like saying well, you know, technically we didn't remove you from the search results, we just put you on page 50384.
I've no dog in this fight, but this seems deliberately obtuse. You could call "traditional" shadowbanning "100% shadowbanning" and what you've just described "95% shadowbanning". They're extremely close.
The practice is fundamentally malicious because innocent people get caught in it all the time. The two main problems both stem from the fact that they don't admit to doing it.
The first is that you're posting interesting things but nobody ever sees it because you're shadow banned, and then what you should really do is create a new account and start over, but you don't know why nobody ever sees it. "Maybe you just don't have much of a following yet." But you never will with that account. An innocent person is subjected to the penalty meant for a spammer -- and suffers longer for it because they have no reason to expect they're being punished when they haven't done anything wrong.
The second is that even if you figure it out, they still don't admit to doing it, the consequence of which is that there is no appeals process. So if you have an account with a significant following and then get shadow banned illegitimately, you're much more likely to notice this because your engagement falls off a cliff, but there is no process for undoing it other than to abandon your account and start over from scratch.