The replies I've seen elsewhere here seem well thought out, and in almost all cases take consideration of the contents of the article into their responses, even if not intentionally.
I like what this article says, and would like to support the promotion of it's content without adding further confounding additional language.
Should I have upvoted the article and said nothing?
P.P.S. This comment could be posted on most things I see on HN without further editing, and would convey what I feel about them.
I believe you're asking how to best promote this specific content?
It depends on who your target audience is: yourself, strangers, coworkers, or friends?
If you want others to follow this advice, do those same people use HN?
If not, what approach will help them see this?
Do you want to save it, and your thoughts on the article for later review? I do this publicly to wrap my head around the problem so I can try to get others to pick apart my mistakes (though perhaps to not great effect due to echo chambers).
To your specific post for this thread: does the article pose a question or an answer?
I believing that is trying to answer a question.
To the boring meta part:
It's my common approach to upvote without replying (sometimes I write the post add discard it).
I'm not 100% clear on the HN culture and focus my replies to further the discussion (this being a meta post feels weird).
Both comments, and upvotes keep a that "alive", having read a few articles due to the sheer number of responses, I believe higher vested effort increases likelihood of others investing time (this is true but only of posts, but work in general).
Onto other articles: I like discussing the topics with data behind them. IBMs Mac rollout is interesting, but I'm wondering (given the source) if it's a PR piece.
To the target audience: It depends on if it's me as a recipient for practicing or me as a vehicle for spreading more humility when working with others (strangers on the internet).
In this case: I'm going to try to remember and reference this article. I don't want to share it yet as I haven't practiced it. (with this post being more a response to your question than the article)
Perhaps the best way to promote this post is living it with intent and sharing it when others ask how you deal with the problem (hopefully doing so well), thus directly answering your question: Upvote and thank you for posting so I could think about this more :)
For clarity's sake, I was not talking about HN in this remark:
> If one person’s presence is derailing the conversation for some reason, don’t automatically decide they must be the bad guy. The absolute worst thing you can do is to tell that person to shut up and leave the discussion while allowing other people to keep attacking them in some way. This includes everyone rebutting their comments that they are no longer allowed to defend because they were asked to stop posting.
I belonged to a different forum for a time where that was official mod policy. Being rate limited, having a comment flagged to death by other users or even being shadow banned on HN where other users can still vouch for your comments is not the same as being publicly told to stop participating in X discussion by a mod and then punished if you dare to defend yourself as others talk all kinds of trash about you while the mods do nothing about it because they are fine with some in-crowd group being awful to some out-crowd group and actively encourage that as a matter of more-or-less official policy.
My sense is that such a moderation log would lead to an order-of-magnitude explosion of litigious meta discussion, which is last thing we we need or want.
If that's right, then it's worse than that, because then metaness would consume a lot more resources than it already does, starving the rest of the site of other things we need to work on. That would be a vicious feedback loop; I'd rather look for virtuous ones.
HN moderation is far more transparent than it was before Dan took over (when 'pg moderated, things like subjective shadow bans really were a norm), and more transparent than it was when he started --- I hesitate to explain how, for fear of fulfilling Dan's prophecy, but one simple, not-fraught example would be the expansion of the guidelines.
I perceive no corresponding change in the amount of meta threads about mis-moderation; noodling debates based on random accusations are still evergreen here.
If I were involved in moderating HN (thank Christ I'm not), I'd conclude that substantive process-level changes aimed at quelling these kinds of debates probably aren't a productive goal.
I apologize. I've used the term "shadow banned" inaccurately.
It's apparently a synonym for something I only think of as hell banned. My quirky brain thinks of HN banning as shadow banning because the comments are visible if you have "show dead" on and can often be brought back to life if couched for. (So, you live in the shadows.)
Thus being banned on HN doesn't necessarily mean you have no voice at all. It can mean fewer people will see your comments and only good comments will be brought to life.
This leaves the door open for expressing yourself and even for potentially finding your way back to being a member in good standing, though that may only happen if something substantially changes an your life.
But people do, at times, have substantial positive changes. Homeless people do sometimes get back into housing. Very sick people do sometimes get better. Drug addicts do sometimes get clean.
And then their behavior may improve without them "trying to behave better" because their life sucks less.
I don't understand the association you're making between having personal
problems and being an asshole in online conversations.
In my experience, on the one hand, most adults have some sort of personal
problem that complicates their life, and on the other hand, people who dont'
seem to be very troubled by what goes on in their personal life are perfectly
capable of being disruptive assholes. So there is really no reason to single
out specific classes of personal problems as causing disruptive behaviour.
I'm also confused by the way you use the term "sick". Do you mean it as in
mental illness, or general sickness, like having the flu, or a chronic
disease?
In any case, I think you're looking for a deeper explanation of why people
behave like assholes online. I don't think there is one. People sometimes
behave like assholes online, even when they're perfectly fine people
otherwise. You just have to find a way to make them see their contributions as
others see them, then they will stop being assholes because nobody likes to
come accorss as an asshole. Online or off.
I can tell you, from experience in this very thread, it feels about as shitty. :/
It's marginalization, fundamentally. A very small group of people (or a single person) decides to use their power to silence you, tell you how wrong you are, and tie your hands behind your proverbial back so you can't defend yourself.
Dang supports it, and others join in. I can't tell you how many times I'll be browsing HN and see my score drop from one page load to the next by exactly as many points as I have comments in my history that can be downvoted. Or how many times a comment of mine gets flagged for reasons that have nothing to do with the HN guidelines.
This forum is broken, and is in dire need of disruption.
I read through a few of your posts on your other account.
In this case am I right to say you feel you are the recipient of unfair abuse?
More so then single individual downvotes can be expected?
When this happens you feel your opinions aren't respected and valued?
I feel shitty when that happens too. I've avoided commenting on controversial threads as a result.
I think the problem is what you're saying is lost in your tone (it also appears to be happening in this post too).
People don't like hearing dissent, or people who disagree with them. My tone is a reaction to the hostility I'm experiencing as a result of that friction.
Most forums have some kind of backstop that prevents the vindictive from causing too much harm. This forum has a vindictive moderator. He needs to go.
It must be frustrating to feel like you're being singled out. More so when you feel hostility from individuals who disagree with you. It can feel very personal, when someone is attacking you and your ideas. Especially when you Know you have a point and it feels like you aren't being heard.
I've spent a lot of time trying to deal with this conflict & trying to be heard and understood. Part of the trick is not taking things too personally, not Making things personal or directing them at an Individual, and instead continuously focusing on the topic at hand. If things devolve to personal attacks of Any sort, I disengage or try to re-focus. My goal is to be heard and understood, and that doesn't happen when the argument devolves to a personal level.
It's hard not to react, but sometimes not reacting & taking the high road is the most productive way forward.
Do you have any insight into why this might be happening? I had a look at your post history and noticed you've posted relatively little this year since a large gap from 2016.
I generally have a lot of respect for HN mods, it's never an easy job.
This happens because one has somehow irked a person who is petty and vindictive and has nothing better to do than click through your profile and downvote every comment they can.
I don't fully understand the mindset that would do this, but it certainly happens.
I usually post from diminoten, but moved to this account to try and figure out why I was getting downvoted instantly nearly every time I commented, and why I was losing the same karma as votable posts that I had in the span of seconds sometimes.
HN is not built to handle dissent. Privileges are based on votes, there are minimal to no vote protection tools in place, the guidelines are used as cudgels to beat people who disagree with the popular view, and the moderator (there's more or less only one, dang) prefers to smokescreen and gaslight anyone he doesn't like with generic comments that don't follow the very guidelines he's trying to enforce. Just look at his comment history; it's full of "This doesn't follow guidelines" without any elaboration, and when he does elaborate, it's an incredibly cynical and not-generous interpretation of the comment he's saying isn't acceptable, which is itself a violation of the HN guidelines, specifically the one about addressing the best form of an argument.
Most of the problem is the fact that dang is the primary active moderator on HN. If others were to take over, and he were to be removed or retire, HN would become substantially better, possibly overnight.
Dang needs to be removed for this site to grow and improve. People think HN is growing; it is not. The quality people who used to post here are more or less gone, and HN isn't attracting new quality posters to fill their shoes, precisely because dang moderates very poorly, which pushes away prospective high value posters.
The reality is, it's high time for a replacement to HN.
This is just an FYI that you can take under advisement if you so choose:
Part of the reason you are getting so very much negative attention in this specific discussion is because your comment complaining about the very site you are posting on was the very first comment posted.
This actively interferes with constructive discussion of the article posted as everyone replies to you and your personal complaints instead of engaging with the content of the article. (The term for it is thread shitting. As the author of the piece, I wasn't real happy to see it.)
You also keep focusing on the negative and on points of disagreement and will not drop it.
I'm sympathetic to your frustration, but there are pieces of this that only you can change. I'm aware you are likely to feel I'm "blaming the victim" rather than trying to empower you. My personal default is to wonder what I can do differently on my end to get better outcomes because I'm typically the piece of the equation I have the most control over, regardless of "who is to blame." I'm generally satisfied with that approach.
Last, I will note that my advice to not automatically assume that this one person is behaving badly doesn't translate to "there is no point at which a mod should ever hold an individual accountable for their piece of the puzzle."
That doesn't work. You don't get a free pass for your behavior for all eternity because you're -- for example -- a woman posting in an overwhelmingly male space.
If I thought being a woman posting on HN meant I can do anything at all that I feel like doing and then blame negative reactions on sexism, I would have been banned ages ago -- and rightly so. Saying that it's not okay for the entire group to behave badly towards one individual and then blame their victim for their own choices absolutely doesn't mean the needs of one individual should trump the needs of the entire community. A moderator's job is to find ways to try to serve both needs at the same time, which is a balancing act.
Please note that I waited to say anything to you until after the piece dropped off the front page in hopes of having fewer eyes on my comment, among other things. I thought about various possible tactics and concluded that replying late was probably the least worst option available to me.
Dang doesn't understand any of what you said, and makes zero attempt at improving, neither himself nor the site at large.
I am certainly not guiltless, but consider the fact that I have none of these problems anywhere else I interact with others. Why is it just on HN that I run into these struggles? I am in lots of communities through my daily interactions, and I successfully navigate those, so what's special about HN, other than dang and the site's mechanics?
This place cannot handle dissent. That's literally the definition of a toxic environment, and dang does nothing to create safety for people who might not agree with the mainstream view. That's on him.
>> Why is it just on HN that I run into these struggles
It's because HN is, actually, a very unique internet message board. It is
unique in that it takes its own guidelines very seriously and enforces them
very actively. Compared to every single other internet message board I've been
on (and I've been around the block a few times, like they say) flamewars are
prevented effectively and personal attacks are simply not tolerated.
For me, that's what keeps me combing back for more. HN is, well, a safe place,
where I can disagree with others, very strongly, without risking that a thread
will degenerate into put-downs and name-calling. This is in stark contrast to
other message boards where there seems to be a genuine belief that "winning" a
thread is some kind of achievement worthy of praise and self-respect.
So to be honest, if you're struggling to adjust to HN but you're feeling fine
on other message boards then I'm inclined to believe that, on the balance of
probabilities, it's because you bring with you behaviours and ways of
communicating that you've learned on other message boards that are
incompatible with HN, and that you are unwilling to change.
P.S. :%s/combing back/coming back/g. But it's a funny one, so I'm leaving it
like that.
A) I've been on HN for 10 years, I'm not "coming from" or "struggling to adjust" anywhere and B) I didn't mean "other message boards" I meant literally every other community I belong to, both professionally and personally. Online and offline.
HN isn't special, dang is the problem, specifically dang. He needs to go. If he goes, I can thrive just fine. During the times he leaves me alone I thrive in here. When he attacks me, that's when I struggle.
This addiction to HN being a special place is complete and utter nonsense, and if that's the koolaid you're drinking, we have little to say to one another.
I've been banned on most forums I've frequented for attracting the petty ire of moderators (these are usually low-status, unpaid volunteers starved for power and meaning). I'm opinionated and provocative, but I always honor the spirit of the law wherever I choose to be, and dang seems to appreciate that despite probably not liking me as a person. For that I say he's an exceptionally good moderator, but there is certainly a demographic problem on HN that I expect is unfixable and outside management's control.
edit: I just looked briefly at the recent threads in your comment history and had to laugh at "I'm afraid I don't really follow what you've written here." And I see your reply here is flagged-and-killed. I continue to not deny any of your complaints specifically.
A. I'm a fan of both how HN works and the moderating staff. (I don't wear that on my sleeve more for reasons covered in the post under discussion: Public praise frequently goes weird places.) So I'm absolutely not sympathetic to your conclusion here.
B. If you think it's absolutely not you and dang and HN are simply broken because everyone else likes you just fine, the logical solution is to just leave. I've basically done that numerous times over the years -- left a forum that just didn't work for me personally -- and I've generally not been all blamey about it. In most cases, I leave quietly and don't run around trash talking them afterwards. I don't expect every single forum to be a good fit for me personally.
C. If you decide you value something about HN enough to keep coming back in spite of the problems you are experiencing, there are some best practices for trying to make that work. Here are a few:
1. Try to understand why other people do what they do in a sympathetic manner. This includes dang.
2. Try to focus on what you can do differently more than on what you wish others would do differently.
3. Try to put some of your negative feelings down and stop making your baggage about the site a large part of your focus when engaging in discussion here. It just keeps the problem alive unnecessarily.
D. I don't really care to engage you further here. I decided replying late was the least worst answer in part because not replying at all can come across as "giving someone the cold shoulder" and can add to their problems, if only inadvertently.
But the bane of my personal existence is people who latch onto me personally and act like they think I'm personally required to meet their emotional needs, magically fix their problem that I have no power to fix, be endlessly kind to them while they are ugly to me and so forth. Choosing to respond in hopes that it might help you does not make me personally responsible for your feelings and your problems for all eternity.
Edit: in the interest of avoiding temptation to reply to you again, please note that my introduction to you was you thread shitting my post which is an article I personally wrote. Yet you clearly seem to think you never do anything wrong and it's everyone else here and also seem to think I should care greatly about your feelings and your needs and your problems while you care absolutely not at all about mine.
You've completely misunderstood my goals in talking to you. This is a public forum, and I'm making a case for why I think the people who read what I write should believe what I'm arguing. This isn't about you, or me, it's about convincing others that the viewpoint I hold is a valid one.
Your opinion of me, your ability to help/not help me, and all the other interpersonal things you're bringing into this are just your baggage. I thought you wrote a great article that had a few specific passages I felt dang should in particular read, and I called that out publicly. If that's "thread shitting", I think maybe you need to re-evaluate the kind of personal relationship you have with people who read your writing.
I think your edit here is an emotional one, and I'm not really going to address it further beyond pointing out in the very comment you're replying to I take some responsibility for my role in how I'm treated here.
Can this be solved by fixing the UI somehow? Half the time I don't remember the guidelines and just go into ranting. The article was definitely eye-opening, I definitely go for negative attention sometimes, sometimes unwittingly and sometimes out of spite for the trends I see. I can certainly see why dang had to remind me a few times about the guidelines. I hate Java and I can be quite trollish about my hate. Oh well, I guess I should just concentrate on what I love.
That said I do have a problem with silencing. This problem was solved in USENET with kill-lists, lists where each user can choose to ignore another list of users maintained democratically without resorting to a few mods, who can be benevolent or not. This is how we block spammy ip addresses using the hosts file! This is a solved problem with a simple solution, heck it can even be applied to every major social networking site out there.
On a side note, why can't HN code be made available on GitHub? It could be one of the biggest lisp projects overnight.
Much of the HN codebase consists of anti-abuse measures that would stop working if people knew about them. Unfortunately.
There's a very old version of HN that pg published years ago (at http://arclanguage.org/). It would be nice to get that updated and maintained, but separating out the secret parts would by now be a lot of work. The time to do it will be if and when we eventually release the alternative Arc implementations we've been working on.
I'm open to doing that. It would just be a nontrivial amount of work and there are many nontrivials on the list.
Yes, there's now an Arc-to-JS called Lilt, and an Arc-to-Common Lisp called Clarc. In order to to make those easier to develop, we reworked the lower depths of the existing Arc implementation to build Arc up in stages. The bottom one is called arc0, then arc1 is written in arc0, and arc2 in arc1. The one at the top (arc2, I think) is full Arc. This isn't novel, but it makes reimplementation easier since you pack as much as possible in the later stages, and only arc0 needs to be written in the underlying system (Racket, JS, or CL).
It also shrank the total Arc implementation by 500 lines or so, which in pg and rtm-land is a couple enclycopedias' worth. That was satisfying, and an indication of how high-level a language Arc is.
Thanks for writing/sharing this. It puts words around some dynamics I’ve seen, and not just online. It got me thinking about people and my mental models of them, which I think is helpful.
Thanks for writing this, it was genuinely interesting and useful. Particularly the parts about negative attention and trolls. I've had a "nice" childhood and don't understand at all how negative attention can be comforting for some people. It really helped to have that explained.
>> So, for example, homeless people and very sick people and disabled people can join the conversation and their personal problems can be inadvertently disruptive in a way that’s very hard to deal with both humanely and effectively.
I feel this is worded extermely clumsimly and it puts people who are homeless, sick or disabled (!) on the spot for causing trouble.
From my experience on HN and other internet message boards, people who are healthy and financially well-off can do a fine job of being disruptive and engaging in flame wars. I don't see the reason to single out homeless, sick or disabled people as being particularly notable for being disruptive.
I'm the author. My actual name is Doreen Michele Traylor.
I spent nearly six years homeless, in part because I have an incurable medical condition. The point of view of the piece is informed by firsthand experience, not prejudice nor judgment against people like myself.
I have spent a lot of years desperately trying to convince people to support my Patreon or leave tips for my blog writing. I get a lot of feedback that I write well, but I also get told a lot "go get a Real Job, writing simply doesn't pay."
I was very open about my problems when I was homeless. The vast majority of the time, it got me open hostility, not aid and support. If people threw money at me every single time I mentioned how dire my situation was, I could have paid cash for a house ages ago.
That's not how that works.
Once in a while, people would take pity on me and kick a few bucks my way. But I lived under constant suspicion that the only possible reason I talked about my reality was that I was de facto soft begging.
I would much, much rather be paid for my writing than kicked a few bucks out of pity occasionally. It would be vastly better for both my bottom line and my sense of self.
Have you heard about Substack? Not big, but YC company, so it's kind of easy to bump around here.
They are a platform to host your blog/newsletter and allow very easily to monetize it.
You can charge at least $5/month from readers that want to get a paying-reader-only emails. Still allow you to post free posts/emails.
I am using them basically as a free blog and newsletter hosting service for now, but with the hope that I grow an audience big enough to charge and earn some extra income.
Why shouldn't persons who are homeless and persons who are disabled be allowed to join the conversation, as you asserted? Do their opinions really count for nothing?
Obviously DoreenMichele isn't asserting that. She was on HN for years herself whilst being homeless. If that doesn't give her legitimacy to talk on this subject, from a homeless perspective and an HN perspective, what would?
Since you care about homeless people and people with disabilities being able to participate in forums, why not listen to someone who did just that? Edit: Apart from everything else, it's an incredibly interesting combination. Other HN users have posted about homelessness from personal experience too. Cross-examination is out of place here. Though I doubt you intended to come across that way.)
> She was on HN for years herself whilst being homeless.
To be clear, in case anyone's confused by that statement about a 2 year old account, DoreenMichele used to have a different username: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Mz
Well now you're really just projecting. The author's point, made in your quoted paragraph and then again in the following two, was clearly that people who are in difficult situations or neuroatypical may be disruptive to "the norms" a lot of users are used to and how to accommodate that.
I think you would have to intentionally take the most uncharitable interpretation of this article to think the authors point was "these people shouldn't be able to take part".
There are whole paragraphs devoted to how to let these people give their relevant first-hand experience without derailing the conversation or getting ganged up on. That doesn't read to me like not wanting them to voice their opinion.
But yes, a moderator should be concerned when groups with very different needs and motivations interact. Not because it's undesirable but because it can easily devolve into nonproductive and even harmful "discussion". It's the same concern a shop manager has when someone is new to using the table saw or torch or whatever. Except, table saws don't have a mind of their own.
Sorry, I might be missing something but can you point out where the author is saying they're against this or that its a "concern"?
They say it can be disruptive - and explicitly say to whom it is disruptive ("people who don't run into the kinds of people normally" i.e the masses) but I'm not seeing this explicit point where the author says it's a bad thing - only that it's a challenge to moderate everyone tactfully.
Can you help me out?
> If one person’s presence is derailing the conversation for some reason, don’t automatically decide they must be the bad guy. The absolute worst thing you can do is to tell that person to shut up and leave the discussion while allowing other people to keep attacking them in some way. This includes everyone rebutting their comments that they are no longer allowed to defend because they were asked to stop posting.
> It is healthier to allow them to vigorously defend their point of view if they wish. If they are the only person representing a particular point of view or experience, do not act like “they are posting too much” if they reply to everyone talking with them about it.
Really wish dang would read this. HN takes the exact opposite approach to this and dang prefers to enforce this to avoid confrontation rather than create a space for conversation.
Edit: this is a great example. I can't reply to anyone here, because I'm rate limited, so people can say how many ways I'm wrong and I have no real ability to defend my argument. This is what dang wants, and it's incredibly toxic. The downvotes pour in and I'm helpless.
But you are still here, fighting against these restrictions to post, which makes me think they are doing something right to create a space so desirable to participate within.
> The absolute worst thing you can do is to tell that person to shut up and leave the discussion while allowing other people to keep attacking them in some way.
Hacker News doesn't let you respond to dead comments, so this isn't true.
You are equating "telling a person to shut up and leave the discussion while allowing other people to keep attacking them in some way" with physically and forcefully removing them from the discussion, when it rather refers to a social expectation/demand of a group vs. an individual.
Such a signal is also sent by downvotes without argument, not to mention piling on to a downvoted or flagged comment (people can respond to response to a flagged comment just fine, and can agree with each other about how horrible the flagged person is or what else they probably advocate for, and all that stuff), while that person is rate limited if not shadowbanned.
I can't vote on comments anymore, neither positive nor negative. No clue why, it's been that way since a few months and I stopped caring, just like I wouldn't terribly mind "writing for the showdead community exclusively".
But I know that I upvoted comments that I found reasonable, and unfairly greyed out. So either I was manually selected for that, without any precedent or any communication, or there's an algorithm that blindly removes voting from people who don't agree with the herd enough. Either way, the people who haven't been on the wrong end of the stick much are always super quick to assume that means there's nothing shitty going on. But that has more to do with what people want to believe, not with actually looking into any of it.
> people can respond to response to a flagged comment just fine, and can agree with each other about how horrible the flagged person is or what else they probably advocate for, and all that stuff
Can people actually do that? I have rarely, if ever, seen this on Hacker News, and I feel like anything like this would be a good way to be downvoted or flagged yourself.
> I wouldn't terribly mind "writing for the showdead community exclusively".
You're not alone: there are a number of people who do this already.
> But I know that I upvoted comments that I found reasonable, and unfairly greyed out. So either I was manually selected for that, without any precedent or any communication, or there's an algorithm that blindly removes voting from people who don't agree with the herd enough.
I wonder if this was supposed to be a nudge to use the "vouch" feature instead? Even if it was, it wasn't a particularly good one. Maybe the moderators could tell you why you can't vote if you emailed them?
We're doing it right now, the top level parent comment was dead before I made my first reply to you.
> Maybe the moderators could tell you why you can't vote if you emailed them?
HN could also have a feature that allows mods to communicate with users. I'm not going to use my main email anyway, and making a throwaway email for that is no more "community-like" -- it's just a hoop I don't see any reason for jumping through. Being transparent about moderating, and discussing such things in the open rather than behind closed doors, is a courtesy so basic for my sensibilities I won't beg for it from those who don't give it freely.
HN is regularly being updated and improved. The ability to vouch for dead comments wasn’t here 10 years ago. Undoing accidental downvotes wasn’t possible. Moderation was much less active back then too, and it shows, detaching comment threads/moderating titles have been two great additions keeping the quality of discussion high even though this place has hundred times the amount of active users as ten years ago (I’m guessing)
HN has been growing at the same rate for many years. There was an initial spike and since then it's been linear, with up and down swings along the way.
I've been showdead forever; apparently I'm supposed to genuflect to one of the mods and beg forgiveness for some slight and I can't quite lower myself to do that on this forum. I apparently can comment, flag, etc., though I don't know who can see it or to what effect. Enough people upvote and/or comment on what I say that it's equivalent to (and somewhat satisfying) be "writing for the showdead community exclusively". Never touched the vouch. YMMV.
Your account isn't penalized in any way. It was banned at one point, but we unbanned it when it was mostly posting good comments. We try to do that as much as we can.
I don't think people get rate limits for having minority viewpoints. They get rate limits for acting rudely and breaking the site guidelines, none of which are viewpoint-specific. (I know, as someone who once had a rate limit and cleaned up his act.)
Popular viewpoint posts get flagged, as they should, when they break the site guidelines. We couldn't care less if a view is popular or not. What we care about is that discussion follow the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Could you please stop complaining about downvotes in HN comments? As the guidelines say, it never does any good and it makes boring reading. It's a perennial weed of offtopicness.
- the amount of other people in this thread complaining about patterns and justification for downvoting
- I had been downvoted multiple times for literally asking a perfectly reasonable question (on a topic that one cannot learn by RTFM)
- I am regularly downvoted for asking clarifying questions of people who say things that are clearly not true while implying I am saying things that are in no way reflected in the actual text, or have been chosen "at random" and warned about engaging in flamebait in threads where numerous people are doing the same or worse than me, the primary difference being I often happen to hold a minority opinion, in a discussion about opinions (something an increasing number of people struggle to differentiate from fact)
....I didn't think it seemed all that unreasonable.
I realize I'm not a model forum participant, and I know you have a hectic and thankless job, but I think it's fair to suggest the possibility that ideology plays a bigger role around here than is optimal, and recognize that all people (including you and I) suffer to some degree from ideological filtering in our judgements. HN having guidelines is a fine idea, but might some common behaviors (say, blatant dishonesty) on this site have varying visibility depending on the observer, and have reached a frequency that may be worthy of reasonable guideline modifications in order to maximize quality of discourse?
I feel quite certain the error message does not match the source code, I suspect it is downvote based, which at times (certain subjects) basically equates to agree with the status quo or be silenced.
Asking a question and stating an explicitly speculative opinion (as opposed to the HN typical and ever popular, provided it is orthodoxy-compliant of course, opinion-stated-as-fact). What might the motive be for multiple people downvoting such a comment.....might it have something to do with a subconscious heuristic reaction to someone questioning the orthodoxy?
Now that I've read further comments in this thread, I now know that rate limiting is manually applied per account, something that afaik has never been explicitly acknowledged before, and is certainly not acknowledged in the deceitful (at least partially) error message: "You're posting too fast".
It's interesting how human judgement of how appropriate/ethical rules and procedures are is often altered by whether or not one is part of the ingroup. In a generic conversation, say on software design principles, I suspect most people would certainly say that objective honesty/correctness is something to strive for, but when the conversation is in this particular implementation, I bet opinions would change.
Another interesting related issue, something one might notice that isn't in the HN guidelines: "Try to be honest; try to speak truthfully." I've suggested this before, but apparently it wasn't deemed important enough, which seems like quite a shame to me because it has become quite a common behavior on HN.
Of course, these things aren't surprising, but they are interesting.
What kind of rate limiting are you seeing? In general, I feel like once you've started feeling the need to post more than once every couple of minutes, then you're more than likely diving in to a nonproductive discussion. (And note that this is different than normally posting more often than that: I am specifically talking about "I need to reply to these four people who are nitpicking me, and I need to rebut their comments now", as opposed to "I'm going through a comment thread and commenting on whatever seems interesting; I would be fine with making this reply at a later point in time".)
What you call "replying to these four people who are nitpicking me" is what someone else might call "defending my point of view against being mobbed/shouted down".
We rate-limit accounts that break the site guidelines and/or get involved in flamewars frequently. We're also happy to remove rate limits—and often do—when people email [email protected] and promise to use the site as intended in the future.
No, what I've seen is a seemingly arbitrary rate limit across multiple articles. More of a "we're tired of your input" than "you need to take time to chill out".
Low-information/high-indignation comments like this are exactly what we rate limit accounts for, when they post too many of them. That's why your accounts are rate-limited, as we've explained to you a dozen times or more.
Most HN users who read this thread, or the history of your accounts, will be surprised how lenient we've been with you.
No, I'm still on topic. I did not realize that Hacker News would rate limit for that long, so I had assumed your comments were just being flagged or killed.
I here's hate when this happens and I can't imagine how you feel.
You have very strong opinions, from the results and status of this thread I think this response is coming from how strongly others are put off by your aggressive defenses and how you're voicing your disagreement with an article or response. (I want aware of Dang before your posts)
The substances on your posts seen very on point, however the tone makes your responses feel personal. I don't like hearing that I'm wrong, combined with a tone where I feel I'm a lesser, stupid, idiot, for having a mistaken brief immediately pushes me defensive. It doesn't matter if I agreed with you initially, if this tone is felt ok the first sentence: I'll never reach your substanive argument for your point to be made.
Your responses feel like an attack on Dang not a criticism of HN, this is encouraging others to defend him, and the site, because the principle feeling is a personal attack.
I'm worried that by posting I'll get that same for of response from you.
I like what this article says, and would like to support the promotion of it's content without adding further confounding additional language.
Should I have upvoted the article and said nothing?
P.P.S. This comment could be posted on most things I see on HN without further editing, and would convey what I feel about them.