I cannot answer about reddit, but the more I read about this issue, the more similar I can see reddit voting system works to the one HN has. AFAIR Reddit was a PG startup (?) so similarities make sense...
When you are hellbanned on HN, here is what happens: nothing. And for sure you are not informed about this in any sort of way: no popup, no messages, nothing. You think everything is normal and you still can write comments, but they appear only to you, which is confusing because you assume others can see them too. You can upvote (and as usual arrow disappears) but your vote does not count. Another thing is that you are being thrown at some sort of non-cached, low-priority server that is as slow as hell. It then takes about 10-15 seconds to open any comments' page (this is confirmed by me, because once I got my account resurrected, everything start working as fast as my internet goes, same moment with no changes on my end). Another thing noticed: after your account is resurrected, your score can go up/down like before, but average score does not change (mine stays .65 for a while now). During dead period I wrote some long and, in my opinion, interesting comments, that were not displayed (especially spent some time on this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4068798 ). A nice fellow from England noticed how silly I am for keep participating in HN community but really being a ghost. I emailed info@ couple times and told them I barely get massive downvotes and my karma stay positive for a long period of time. I don't spam or troll. Nothing happened. After couple days I start emailing PG and about 12 hours later got email from someone else apologizing about being killed and my account got resurrected.
I hope that PG/HN/team will add some features so that someone killed can know about it.
edit: sorry didnt answer: as of HN, no, the system is not that hellish. Score does not go up just for you (so you would assume everything is fine).
Telling driver that he got ticket defeats the purpose of ticketing drivers? Sorry for my bias logic, but don't you think I may want to learn a lesson and become better "HNer"? Hellbanning is like the ultimate death penalty. No warnings, no tickets, no first or second degree, nothing, just "we don't want you here anymore".
If I would get some sort of warning of what I am doing wrong, I may be given a chance to learn. Isn't that the purpose behind coming to HN? To learn?
On HN, downvotes and flags are the warnings and tickets.
Hellbans are only intended for spam accounts and trolls, neither of which is going to change their behavior. Sometimes people that aren't spammers or trolls get hellbanned, but that's an unfortunate side-effect of imperfect algorithms and moderators, not intentional.
A professional/habitual troll will know about hellbanning, and techniques like your "open in incognito window". Making it hard to know than you're hellbanned hurts innocents who were misidentified far more than it hurts actual spammers.
No not entirely. It acts like its being upvoted by the banned account, and to everyone else. It just doesnt actually count behind the scenes. If all you needed was 2 reddit accounts to detect if you're banned or not, it wouldnt be a very sound system ;)
Reddit uses an "upvote fuzzing" algorithm. All up votes you see anywhere on reddit are approximations influenced by the shadowban system. Only after a story has become old and locked, do the upvote totals truly stabalize to their actual levels.
The stories position on the site is based on the actual numbers. The numbers next to the story are just approximate though, to help fool banned accounts.
This is why things like Reddit Enhancement Suite that show upvote/downvote totals for comments are largely incorrect, and nothing more than a novelty.
On reddit the vote counts are fuzzed so nobody ever really knows if their individual vote counted. Even on stories with as little as 5 votes, the actual count displayed will fluctuate between 3 and 7. The only way you can really tell if you've been shadow banned is if your whole network of puppet accounts no longer has an effect.
