Ok, didn't knew that. Still a dick move on HN's part. Shadowing should be restricted to abusers.

Wouldn't the submission get user flagged anyway? Because when people clicked it, they'd see something NSFW and devoid of interesting content.

Flagged for what? In this case user - me - was unaware that submitted content gets replaced when requested with Referer header mentioning HN. There should be a 'you cannot post this' warning instead of hidden post creation. I only noticed shadowban by accident: switched to logged-in browser to submit and went back to logged-out for browsing.

> Flagged for what?

Flagged for being NSFW and devoid of interesting content. The average user, like you, is unaware that the content they are seeing is different from the content you submitted.

All I see is a testicle in an egg-cup. Hardly special.

(Though it might be a good idea to special-case this to ad a non-referral link at submit time.)

Ah, OK. My hazy memory was that it was the goatse.cx image, which is for most people more unpalatable than a testicle in an eggcup, but I didn't check exactly what it was :-).