Notes

Last week I posted an article about how the professional site Stack Overflow renamed the account of Luigi Mangione while keeping all of Luigi’s content under a different name (seemingly in violation of the Creative Commons license). The company has not commented officially. We know at one point my article made it to the front page listing because we have an archived copy. However, it mysteriously dropped off.

[…]

The reason why is a pretty open secret in the industry. It’s a tool frequently employed called shadow banning. Moderators have the option of using this tool whereby the ban isn’t made apparent to the user most likely to complain, in this case the submitter.

What Hacker News did was scrub the article from the front page to deny new exposure, and allow those that have seen it to engage as if nothing happened. They have a history of these kinds of shenanigans. Hacker News where the billionaires hack together your news