Comment by tripzilch

I get your fear, but it was a while back that the shadowbanning was really out of hand, with perfectly sensible people continuing to spend time and effort writing thoughtful comments, oblivious to the fact that only a handful of the userbase could even see them.

For that reason I've had `showdead` on since ever. There used to be so many normal comments grayed out because of some unrelated misstep of that user elsewhere.

But, roughly about when we got new mods (dang and the other one), that things started changing. Recently, I've pretty much only seen grayed out comments that were actually inflammatory, in some sense. Not that I'd always agree with the fact they got downvoted, but at least I could see it had to do with the content of that particular post.

So posting a joke risks downvotes, but not shadowbans.

I do agree that HN is one of the most dry, humourless discussion boards I have ever seen. While megablast says "humour is allowed here", while technically true, I really have to say there is pretty much no space for humour on HN, at all.

The only reason why there are even a few funny posts or jokes on HN at all is because you can't put a stop to humour, it'll find a way.