[phpnode]

since almost forever, that's what the "show dead" toggle in your profile settings is for - it shows the dead posts from shadow banned people

[andersa]

I always assumed that those were posts that got flagged too often.

[daneel_w]

"Spamming", or rather, responding too quickly in an intense discussion, is cause for automatic shadowban here on HN. It happened to me on a previous account some years ago. The posts themselves were harmless, I merely responded to too many users in a too short timeframe. My attempts at having the ban undone also turned out to be a waste of time. Completely absurd.