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I don't think it's immoral - it's their site, after all. Our being able to post here at all is a privilege afforded to us, and their choosing to revoke that privilege for any reason is fully within their rights. No cause or explanation is even required, though they are frequently provided out of the abundant courtesy that the moderators seem to have a natural talent for. If you think about it, even rate limiting is a slightly more courteous alternative to outright banning someone.

I think shadowbanning is a bit unethical as it technically involves lying, but afaik HN doesn't do such things.

> I don't think it's immoral - it's their site, after all.

> I think shadowbanning is a bit unethical as it technically involves lying

These two points contradict, and also HN does do shadowbanning ("marking as dead")

>I think shadowbanning is a bit unethical as it technically involves lying, but afaik HN doesn't do such things.

It does. A ban on HN is a shadowban. You can still post but only those who have "show dead" on will see it (greyed out and marked dead).

While shadowbanning has been made political, it is a key tool in managing a community. If you ban a troublemaker, they just make a new account. So if you can isolate a troublemaker without them understanding what's happening, you improve the community and reduce the whack-a-mole game.

And ultimately, "freedom of speech" refers to the government silencing speech, not private companies/private websites. We are all guests here, and if someone isn't upholding the standards the people who run this website want people to uphold, then they're free to do whatever they want.

Shadowbanning is when you don't tell the user that they're banned. When an account has an established history on HN, we tell them we're banning them and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Shadowbanning is something we only do for either (1) spammers or (2) new accounts that are showing signs of being repeat abusers. This seems to be roughly the correct tradeoff.

Responding to an offending user’s comment on a site with no notifications barely qualifies as telling them. If you truly wanted to inform them, you would either put a banner next to their name in the header or simply prevent them from being able to post. You and I both know what the intention is here, just like the rate limit you have placed on my account.

It's telling them in the same way that anybody tells anybody anything here.

Obviously the intention is to inform—otherwise why bother? Those comments take a lot of time to write.

This post has been deleted and the user has left.

I can confirm for you that you're not shadowbanned. Flagging comes from users, not moderators. It simply means that multiple members of the community in good standing indicated that your comments are not a good fit for HN.

I suspect your "other comment" got flagged for being political polemic from a new account, which fits the pattern of, as dang phrased it, "repeat abusers".

> Our being able to post here at all is a privilege afforded to us, and their choosing to revoke that privilege for any reason is fully within their rights.

I really hate it when discourse about anything devolves into rights.

If I have a genius or terrible take like "Chairs are pointless. Nobody should use chairs because ..." you can't just say "Well actually The Constitution allows people to use chairs and you can't ban the private use of chairs." That doesn't bring anything to the discussion.

Nobody is saying here that HN isn't legally allowed to control the content on its website, but different people have different opinions about what's right and wrong for websites to do which doesn't involve having to bring the government in to settle things.

> And ultimately, "freedom of speech" refers to the government silencing speech, not private companies/private websites. We are all guests here, and if someone isn't upholding the standards the people who run this website want people to uphold, then they're free to do whatever they want.

If you hold this opinion then you can never say water, food, shelter, internet, etc. are human rights either.

"Freedom of speech" does not simply refer to the 1st amendment - the concept has existed much longer than the USA has. I don't think GP is arguing that shadowbanned users have a "right" to use HN, instead they're saying that it is somewhat unethical because it is a form of lying.

As for shadowbanning being a key tool in managing a community - In HN's case, I imagine any shadowbanning system could be easily defeated, as a malicious actor could create a new account for every comment.

Different frameworks of ethics disagree on whether lying is always unethical. Shadowbanning-as-lying can be seen as feeding misinformation to a hostile actor in an attempt to impede them. In that sense, it's no more unethical than someone demanding the combination to a safe so they can rob it and a person responding with a false combination.

> As for shadowbanning being a key tool in managing a community - In HN's case, I imagine any shadowbanning system could be easily defeated, as a malicious actor could create a new account for every comment.

New accounts have no history and no score, so they fit into the community in a (justifiably) low-reputation place. While you can do that, you'll have an army of "greentext" accounts and the community tends to downsample their opinions.

In this context, I think it's an appeal to the ethics of property rights over some other framework. It's an answer to the (undefended in the post) statement "[Rate limiting] is certainly immoral" by offering a framework in which it is not: "People run servers, and they host users on those servers. What is 'moral' on those servers is the will of the operator, and we are all guests. Morality extends to us the opportunity to freely leave at any time; it need not extend us more than that."

One can argue this framework is bad, but it is a framework under which one can consider the question of whether rate-limiting is immoral.

(I'd even go further to argue that "my property my rules unless the government has declared otherwise" is a default ethical framework for, at least, most Americans. Be it Disney World or my own hearth, there are a set of rules, written and unwritten, that those who do not co-own the property must abide while inhabiting the property or operating the property, and the owner may revoke the privilege of inhabitance or operation at, broadly, their discretion. Maybe "ownership makes right" isn't good enough for the specific context of "a user of a freely-provided authenticated public forum", but I think the burden is on the person holding that opinion to explain why we need a rule more restrictive than the default property-ownership-based 'my forum my rules').