This has been discussed a lot under the term "shadowbanning" in various places.
HN does this too, if enough people downvote a comment it will disappear from the conversation, but not from the posters viewpoint (and if you have showdead on, as a reader it shows up as lighter and lighter shades of grey).
The rational behind it is that if a spammer notices that their post/account has been banned, they can quickly spin up another one.
Apparently this is quite effective against spammers, (or used to be) but of course seems extremely unfair in the case of false negatives.
So when you say dishonest - how would you feel if the fine article was written by someone who said he had wasted 2 months on Medium writing posts that try to trick people into downloading malware before he realised that Medium had shadowbanned his account?
HN does this too, if enough people downvote a comment it will disappear from the conversation, but not from the posters viewpoint (and if you have showdead on, as a reader it shows up as lighter and lighter shades of grey).
The rational behind it is that if a spammer notices that their post/account has been banned, they can quickly spin up another one.
Apparently this is quite effective against spammers, (or used to be) but of course seems extremely unfair in the case of false negatives.
So when you say dishonest - how would you feel if the fine article was written by someone who said he had wasted 2 months on Medium writing posts that try to trick people into downloading malware before he realised that Medium had shadowbanned his account?