>...I think the cruel part is that everything appears normal - but your are totally invisible...

Indeed. I cannot for the life of me understand the logic behind this behavior. If you've been banned or had a comment killed, it would be a basic courtesy to provide some sort of notification/reason in your profile.

ag80: That's one of the motivations behind lobsters. I think if HN were a little more transparent, it would mitigate the cold feeling of being hell banned. When I thought I had been shadow banned, it was like being banished from the internet. It really felt horrible.

Knowing that I'd have gotten a warning/notification means if the site is slow, I'd brush it off as high latency. Now every time the site is a little slow, I panic and think I've been slow banned.

You can always just look at your comment history while you're logged out. If things are missing, you've been shadowbanned.

I just realized I meant to say "slow banned".

ag80, you appear to be hellbanned (ironically enough). Couldn't tell why from a glance at your commment history.

Indeed, I was. An apparent false spam positive from my lone submission.