In the meantime we've marked Pino's account as legit so this won't happen again.
The first several comments I vouched for were instantly undeadened. My vouches no longer have that effect (or, potentially, any effect). Either this is based on frequency and too many vouches dilutes the value of your vouch, or a moderator disagreed with one or more of my vouches and manually decreased/disabled it.
I would usually leave a comment explaining that I vouched and why. I think the last vouch that worked had an uncivil comment in the first sentence, but no one else raised the point he made, which I thought was critical to the discussion, so I replied saying that I vouched despite the uncivil sentence because I thought it was an important part of the discussion (and it did launch a lengthy subthread). [IIRC. Google can't seem to find that thread anymore, so maybe it got manually re-killed.]
On people whose comments didn't appear to violate the rules but were shadowbanned anyway, I'd vouch for them and usually tell them they were shadowbanned. Example at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13382934 . I can only imagine that HN doesn't like it when someone tells a shadowbanned person that they've been shadowbanned, but I can't help but feel sad when I see someone putting out real, heartfelt comments without the awareness that they're not going anywhere.
I also do this out of sympathy, because I imagine that one day, I will also be shadowbanned for violating the SV orthodoxy (HN has previously "slowed" my account, imposing a [long] artificial lag time on each page; this was in place for years until I emailed requesting its removal, and the mods graciously agreed).
A few weeks ago I came across an account that had existed for several years and had been shadowbanned about six months back, making mostly-relevant and applicable comments the whole time, so HN doesn't seem to consider account track record if something goes beyond the pale. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14230352. I didn't end up vouching for his comment because it does run off into unnecessarily controversial territory, but at this point why not? I should just vouch for practically everything I don't like seeing deadened because it doesn't appear to matter anymore anyway.
If you don't want to lose your vouch, it seems that the safe route is to vouch only for obvious cases of mis-applied spam filters, like this one.
I think the vouch system may work better if each user is given an absolute number of tokens, e.g., one vouch per calendar year for each year of account age. That would discourage "excessive" vouching. It would also be better to call it "vote to unspam" if the sole intent is to bypass the autospam filter.
I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but consider what morons we'd be if that were true. We don't ban people for such a thing, or know (or care) what it is.
I've restored your vouching privileges, but you probably overdid it at some point. Also, please try to keep the meta-commentary to a minimum? The reason we don't like people saying "@throwaway993 you are shadowbanned" is because of what it does to signal/noise ratio—that's one reason we created vouching in the first place. Meta is like styrofoam packing nuggets, if they grew like the Ghostbusters marshmallow.
Are there guidelines on the intended use that I missed? I pretty much just saw "Don't abuse it", which I didn't feel like I was doing. I also assumed that it worked similar to flagging and voting (weighted against other voters), and would've been more cautious if I knew there was normally a 1:1 between vouch and undeadening, which seems to be the case.
I appreciate the restoration, and I'm sure you're right that I overdid it. I will be judicious with it moving forward. Thanks for the restore.
>Also, please try to keep the meta-commentary to a minimum? The reason we don't like people saying "@throwaway993 you are shadowbanned" is because of what it does to signal/noise ratio—that's one reason we created vouching in the first place. Meta is like those styrofoam packing nuggets if they grew like the Ghostbusters marshmallow.
OK, I understand that position. And it is nice to know that "improper shadowban" is among the signals received by moderators when a vouch is made. I have other thoughts, but in the interest of keeping meta-discussion minimized, I'll leave it there. ;)
In practice the community is surprisingly good at it. Of all the experiments we've tried, this one exceeded expectations the most, and we believe it has affected HN for the better in both obvious and subtle ways.