It's how the Reddit spam filter works. Once your account is flagged as spam by the system, it would be global shadowbanned automacially. At this stage, your account is essentially finished, it's basically impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked. Eventually the account would be deleted, all the post you've ever made would also be gone in the worst-case scenario, just like my previous account. My R…
Shadow banning is such a disgusting practice. It's basically sweeping the "problem" under the rug, whilst leaving the "problem" completely in the dark with regards to what it was they did wrong. It's lazy, it's abusive, and it should be illegal. Edit: to clarify, I'm totally fine with this tool being employed to combat spam(bots). Just not against normal posters/contributors.
I really dislike "it should be illegal" for things like this. It's itself a lazy solution against a hard problem. It seems to often be used as shorthand for "I don't like this and I want it to stop". But making things illegal isn't a magic "make it stop" button. (Hello, War On Drugs, War On Terror, War On Poverty, etc).
If you want to involve the Government in solving your problem, you now must also account for:
* What is the exact text of a law against this that could actually make it through any particular Congressional body?
* How will possible violations of this law be reported and investigated?
* How will that law be misused by malicious prosecutors and investigators to hassle and punish anybody they don't like?
* How will all of the actors involved actually change their behavior in ways that you didn't expect in order to avoid being targeted for either well-intentioned or malicious prosecution for possible violation of these new laws?
Example: Say I run a pseudonymous social media site resembling Reddit, and shadowbanning is the only thing keeping it from being a hopeless pit of spam right now. If I can't shadowban anymore, maybe my only solution is to require hard proof of identity for all users at least as strict as the KYC your banks use. Now everything you ever post is hard-linked to your identity. Even if not publicly shown normally, it's vulnerable to hacks, malicious employees, or Government requests. That would obviously benefit the Government, so there's a little incentive for them to implement and enforce any such law in such a way that sites are effectively forced to do this. Whoops, we just made the problem worse.