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Comment by beedogs | Hacker News Reader

My comment was hardly "abusive". And this is probably the second time in ten years that I've been called out for a comment I've made here, which is hardly a "ton of slack" or "more warnings than most."

Not that it surprises me. I'll never forget this is the site that shadow-banned me for saying the world "needs more Snowdens".

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It's at least the fourth. But why did you need more than one?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568283

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216126

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309353

> I'll never forget this is the site that shadow-banned me for saying the world "needs more Snowdens".

I call this kind of comment the "linkless martyr": the romantic tale of a noble freethinker cruelly repressed by the mods, supplying full interpretation for the reader yet mysteriously omitting any link that people could make up their own minds about. The idea that we ever banned an HN user for Snowden advocacy is silly.

More seriously, you've posted so many genuinely nasty comments to this site, and we'd really appreciate it if you'd stop. It's doable. Other people have done it before you (I'm one).

> I propose to call this category of comment the "linkless martyr": the romantic tale (somehow always the same) of a noble freethinker cruelly repressed by the mods, always offering full interpretation for the reader, yet mysteriously including any pointer to the original source, where people could decide for themselves what happened. This is a classic of the genre. I feel confident making fun of it because the idea that we ever banned an HN user for Snowden advocacy is silly

Well, obviously you didn't read enough of my "genuinely nasty comments" to find it, but here's the comment that got me banned:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183189

And here's where I figured it out and asked why:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6190847

Feel free and check the history on that first one if you don't believe me.

I checked the logs, and no, it was for the garden-variety nastiness of the predecessor comment ("Have you been anywhere near technology for the past 20 years?"), and even that was probably just a last straw since I'm pretty sure you'd done it lots before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=beedogs&next=6183189

Nowadays we tell people when we're banning them for comments like that; for a bunch of reasons it wasn't feasible to do that at the time. Even now, though, when we give a public explanation, some people love to fabricate a self-flattering story and post it melodramatically in later threads. They're careful never to supply the original data so readers could make up their own minds; hence the linkless martyr.

I guarantee you we would not have banned someone merely for supporting Snowden in summer 2013. It would have meant banning most of the site.

Right, I was only told flat-out that I was banned for the Snowden comment, but by all means, go ahead and rewrite history and make it about the totally innocuous comment that preceded it. Wouldn't be the first time I've seen it done on HN.

It's really no wonder this site has the reputation it does in the tech community these days.

"Told flat-out" by whom? When? I'll happily apologize if I'm wrong about this, but having just looked at the data, I'd be shocked.

There are only two people who would have been in a position to tell you such a thing. One doesn't show up in that data set, the other is me, and I know I wasn't banning people just for a yay-Snowden. More definitively, the ban trail starts with the predecessor comment (i.e. 6170753 not 6183189). Had we banned you for 6183189 the prior comment would never have been killed.

Not OP, but thanks for taking your time here. You've shown a level of customer service that the vast majority of commercial products/companies fail to show.

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