News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:A list of Hacker News's undocumented features and behaviors by Jtsummers on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @02:09PM (#38774885)
Assuming no violent (as in promoting) or particularly racist/sexist comments in their history, this hits some new accounts if they're using a VPN (some particular VPNs, I guess?). Sometimes they get caught up in the same filters used to block spammers/abusers from using HN. Or if their first (or one of their first) comments was a link without substantial text, that also gets people put into some kind of "spammer" category. You, or they if you tell them, can reach out through the email in the contact link at the bottom to get the ban addressed.
Re:A list of Hacker News's undocumented features and behaviors by realusername on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @02:19PM (#38775011)
I found back the username in my browser history, the name is baybal2, it's a fairly old account so I'm not sure what caused it.

I'm going to contact the moderation indeed, it's the first time I was seeing non-spam comments being shadow banned automatically.

Re:A list of Hacker News's undocumented features and behaviors by justsomehnguy on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @05:19PM (#38776719)
> so I'm not sure what caused it

The behaviour of the account holder.

Re:A list of Hacker News's undocumented features and behaviors by nkurz on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @05:42PM (#38776894)
You've found an odd edge-case. baybal2 is banned intentionally, despite the fact that most of his posts are good, and some are great. Unfortunately, the remainder aren't. The compromise is that he's banned, but users like me vouch for many of his good posts to make them visible. Here's a post from Dan about him a couple years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29692791. And another from 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898.