I've been on HN when PG used to personally reply to me in posts and this is some stasi level op. Not surprisingly. I went into HN on a VPN using a Chrome incognito tab and noticed my comments and posts were not being shown. Silently discarded, and lost in the ether. I get it, spam and bots are a thing, but perhaps somebody who's been active on HN since 2011 (6525 karma) and personally interacted with PG and YCombinator shouldn't always be shadow banned.