We've banned your account because we asked you not to post these. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.
I think you just banned someone who is a positive contributor to HN.
But there are two issues beyond what you're saying. First, when we ask someone not to do something and they keep doing it, we're within our rights to ban them. It's not something we always do, but we sometimes do. Second, the issue is sometimes swung by additional data that isn't public. If we don't make it public, that's often out of courtesy to the user.
In your long experience, how is this detrimental to good HN conversations?
I wrote about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538480 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538499.
Better, I'll even tell you why: I use summaries to decide to read the original article or not. Your argument seems to stand on the idea that a short title is enough to decide if an article is worth my time to read. It often is not. The first thing when I see a title that looks interesting is to read the first few top comments to see if other HN reader have found it interesting and get more information about the content.
The extreme version of your position would be that we don't need titles either: HN reader should just trust that top links are intersting since they made it to the top and the title line would just give them incorrect information to discuss, everyone should just read every article that appears in the top 30.
This is obviously ridiculous.
You think titles are enough. I don't, and otehr obviously also disagree.
A summary doesn't tell you that though. The comment ceases to be a comment and instead functions as a sort of mechanical interpretation. As technical people concerned with taxonomy, we can't have "summary comments", that's just crazy talk!
Not only that, but what of the ethical dilemma of posting a "TL;DR" for something that isn't your own writing? That's self-appointed editorial control when nobody agreed to that.
That said, I like summaries, but only when a genuine opinion comes with them. The summary service I see mentioned sounds interesting for sure, definitely a good idea. Although it's not quite clear to me how I would access that.
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EDIT: So, much for any calms of transparency[1]:
(1) It's not clear why the user was ban.
(2) Mod requested to deal with the issue offline.
-- To be clear, this is NOT about debating the matter, it's about transparency and helping the community understand how things work. To be more clear, I've posted and seen others post TLDR and unclear if these shouldn't be posted on HN, or if there's something else going on.
[1] When dang took over HN, the topic of transparency was covered, and though I may have misunderstood, more transparency was promised.
When we ban someone and they email us, we simply ask them to promise not to do it again, and if they do, we unban them and welcome them back.
Edit: abhi3 emailed and is now unbanned.
and if you showdead:yes you'll see 'these' types are 'TLDR' summaries
a previous example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11537818
also, dang even gave him an out if just requests it.. all seems very reasonable
IIRC before dang people used to be shadowbanned. Again IIRC pointing out that someone has been banned now is a huge step towards transparency.