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Comment by joering2 | Hacker News Reader

He said he registered them from Public Wifi. So anyone registering first account on HN from said cafee will be banned?

Why are you so surprised he might have multiple accounts? You really have one email account? How about work-related email? Company-facing related email? If anything, its actually good he has multiple accounts and stuff related to / from his company account he is posting from company, and private is private.

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Actually I didn’t say that. The phenomenon in question has nothing to do with where the account was registered. The accounts get banned if I just browse to HN from that cafe. The first account that got banned that way was years old and had 5000+ karma. It took me a while to figure out that it was banned because you can still post and you can see your posts and vote and whatnot but nobody else can see your posts at all. It’s pretty evil.

> You really have one email account?

No, I have 5, but I only have one HN account. Why would I need more?

I was thinking more that he might have been identified as being the same person posting from multiple accounts, and activating some kind of spam/abuse protection.

> Why would I need more?

For same reason you have multiple email addresses no?

I have multiple email address for different purposes. I don't need multiple HN accounts for different purposes.

Others might but I can't think why off the top of my head. The only time I've seen an obvious alternate account is the throw-away accounts opened just to troll/spam the site.

One example would be is that you might work for a company and have their point of view expressed on HN all the time; meanwhile you want to have your own account personal one that regardless if you continue working for said company or not, you still continue to use. Sort of like TV anchors have their own private twitter hints and then they have their work ones too.

That makes sense.

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