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.
