Comment by dang
2 years ago
People are far too quick to jump to sinister conclusions when usually the phenomena are mundane and/or random. We're always happy to answer questions.
> all site submissions that I've made for the last 2 weeks appeared shadowbanned/ghostbanned. They are not "dead", they simply don't show to the public.
That's not true. What made you think it was?
2 your submissions were killed because the sites are banned; one of those submissions was vouched for by users, which is fine. Another 2 (the youtube ones) were killed by a spam filter which might have been buggy - I need to dig deeper into that. All your other submissions of the last 2 weeks were fine. Also, the ones that were killed were marked [dead] the normal way.
Well, any link that I have tried to submit, still doesn't show publicly. The latest doesn't show dead either, just doesn't show period. You are saying it's a possible glitch, but this glitch has been 100% at stopping the public showing of any submissions for going on 3 weeks. Most people would think something odd is going on.
> this glitch has been 100% at stopping the public showing of any submissions for going on 3 weeks
No, these went through fine:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34940475
Two were killed because the sites are banned. The remainder were all youtu.be links - that's still part of a spam filter because for many years those shortcuts were posted mostly by spammers. Our software converts them to youtube.com now because it follows canonical URLs, but it doesn't unban them. I need to look at the data to decide if we should change that or not. In the meantime, if you post youtube.com links directly they should be fine.
To put this in perspective, in terms of defacto banning or shadowbanning. After 5 days, still can not submit anything. Any attempts to submit a link, results in "You're posting too fast."
Blocking any submissions for 5 days or more, on top of glitches, is just about the equivalent of a ban. The reasons for it can be glitches, censoring, subjective administrative prerogative, etc... But from the user perspective, it's hard to see it as just "random" occurrences.
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Something else to possibly consider, is the submission rate restrictions, on top of glitches. Like blocking people from submitting a link based on frequency. An example is I submitted 1 link 2 days ago, and an attempt to post a new one gets the "submitting too fast" type message. Possibly some ongoing punishment that was handed out in the past, but appears to have no time limit.
This can arguably be seen as a defacto ban or even censorship if a person is opposed to the reasons for the punishment. 1 submission per 2 or 3 days, is such a reduced frequency of posting level, that the person may not bother anymore. As it is, I don't come around here too much anymore.
I see. Actually, there are some other sites that don't accept youtu.be links as well. For some reason, didn't remember it being an issue here, but I guess so. That should explain why they don't show as dead, but also don't show publicly.