Hacker News Transparency | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Transparency

hn.0x2237.club

159 pointsstaunch83 comments

In the titles change, you should add some kind of highlighting, because most changes are minor.

(My favorite: "American Airlines Accidentally Let Too Many Pilots Take Off the Holidays" -> "American Airlines Accidentally Let Too Many Pilots Take the Holidays Off")

The section "Recently deleted posts" should be "Recently killed posts". Also, the number of comments in each post is wrong, many have more than 0 comments.

It's crazy how much work they're putting into the titles. Of the 10 most recent title changes on this site, I count 7 that are grammar and wording fixes done solely to make the titles more readable and consistent, with no component of damping down editorializing or promotion --- in other words, with no "policy" objective, but just to quietly make the site better.

+1, text diff highlighting would be a great usability win.

One thing I would point out here is that things marked [dupe] are listed in the "deleted" list. These are probably not deleted to remove discussion, but... because they're duplicates. If someone is looking at this list they might believe certain submissions are being deleted to censor them, rather than them just being oversubmitted topics/articles.

Cache (site is down):

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

Still down 7 hours later, but the cache works

Couldn’t be more timely. There have been a couple of front-page stories that were flagged into oblivion just today. Look forward to seeing how external tools will help us keep track of these stories.

Do Flagged posts fall under "Recently deleted posts"?

Some have said the categories aren’t properly named and I’ve not been able to access the site due to the HN hug of death.

Speaking of transparency, one thing I've often wondered is if HN algorithms or admins ever downvote links to competitors such as Reddit.

I've sometimes submitted links to Reddit discussions and they virtutally never get upvoted. In the past I've just assumed this was because HN's readers themselves didn't want to see such links, but now I wonder if HN's algorithms or admins downvote or otherwise bias the site against them.

Some sites are penalized because they have been the source of many lightweight submissions. You may not be surprised to learn that reddit.com is one.

However, there are many ways for such penalties to get overridden. For example, if the submitter is known to have posted many fine submissions in the past, the penalty doesn't count. Your account is one of those. Thanks for posting fine submissions to HN!

By the way, it's not hard to get answers to things like this that you're wondering about. You simply need to ask us at hn@ycombinator.com.

How is a submission considered to be "fine?" Looking at @pmoriarty's history, it seems that his submissions are not highly upvoted...

A combination of what the community has liked in the past and what moderators, plus a small number of story reviewers, think it might find intellectually interesting.

> it seems that his submissions are not highly upvoted

This ebbs and flows. But see https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:pmoriarty%20points%3E10&sor...

Reddit is a YC company and HN is just a free service provided through YC (not a company), so it doesn't really seem like they have the incentive to do this.

Now if only you had some way to show how many people are shadow-banned or have their posts automatically buried.

People seem to think this place is better than Facebook, Reddit or all the other vote-based, algorithm-driven discussion forums that encourage groupthink, but that's probably because they've never been guilty of posting an unpopular opinion.

It might be eye-opening if they could see how heavily manipulated these discussions really are.

Speaking as someone who does just that... it’s a good site for the quality of the minds here, bad for the degree of censorship. Having said that, it feels more honest than FB. This is YC pursuing their own best interests very openly with HN... it isn’t “social media for the people.” I might prefer differences, but it’s easy to accept what’s offered when that offer is very clear at the outset.

You also have to understand why draconian measures are in place... it’s weakness. This is a site full of people who could never be banned, only whichever account they use at the time. Tons of moderation online depends on user ignorance, and when that fails you have to roll out the dirty tricks.

It is literally all they have which works at all. It’s this, or hiring a few hundred mods to sift through absolutely everything, which comes with its own issues. I’m not sure how you would improve this system without radically changing it, especially while trying to minimize the impact of bad actors.

> This is YC pursuing their own best interests very openly with HN

That's actually true, but not in the sense that most people mean it. Usually when I hear this it means something like "HN promotes YC's business and suppresses criticism of YC", phrased in more sinister language. But that of course would be the dumbest way to operate such a site, especially with this crowd.

The way we promote YC's interests is simply by trying to keep HN interesting. The most interesting HN is the most valuable-to-YC HN. That's why people come here, so that's all we optimize for. Literally everything we do with site moderation derives from that.

For example, why do we moderate flamewars? Not because we secretly agree with one side or the other but because flamewars are repetitive and therefore bad for curiosity. Plus they encourage people to do worse things, so their damage extends forward in time. These are empirical observations, not moral edicts. We just look for what makes HN richer and more complex vs. what makes it dumber. Scorched earth makes it dumber.

I remember years ago hearing a radio interview with the CEO of Costco. When asked, "What would you say to Wall Street analysts who criticize you for giving all those benefits to your employees?" he replied, "I would say have you ever run a major retailer?" Something similar is how I feel when people criticize how we moderate HN. The trouble isn't the criticism—I'd be delighted to be shown how to do this better. The trouble is that the criticisms usually aren't relevant to the actual problem of running HN, which is: how to maximize the interestingness of a public-anonymous internet forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity. Maximizing interestingness includes preventing decay.

I hope that doesn't sound complainy. We're all lucky to have the opportunity to participate in an experiment like this. It derives from two things, btw: pg's own curiosity, which started the site, and the fact that the people running YC get HN's core value. It's an unusual set of conditions and we're all responsible for making something interesting of it.

p.s. I forgot to add that there are also some formal ways that HN gives back to YC: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs and https://news.ycombinator.com/launches.

For example, why do we moderate flamewars?

The desire to suppress "flamewars" is great, but once one has a tool called a "flamewar detector" it's easy to lose sight of the fact that not everything that triggers the detector is in fact a flamewar that should be suppressed. Occasionally (rarely? frequently?) what's being suppressed is high quality fast-paced discussion. Once one has a tool that provides some degree of the benefit (the flamewar detector), I'd guess that it can be easy to confuse the actual goal with the incidental behavior.

I'm intrigued by this idea of "expected failure". That is, cases where the outcome is actually non-desirable, but since the software worked according to spec, the failure is considered a success by those who designed the software. How do you go about assessing whether the suppression is having the desired effect? Is it based on something more subtle than slowing down the rate of commenting when it's going "too fast"? Are there knobs that can be tweaked to keep it from triggering on desired discussion?

> not everything that triggers the detector is in fact a flamewar that should be suppressed

Scott and I get emailed every time that software trips so we can quickly look at which threads are being penalized and reverse the penalty when it isn't helpful. The only time we don't do that is when we're sleeping.

We tend to call it the 'overheated discussion detector' these days, since it detects more than flamewars. However, that phrase is more awkward to say than 'flamewar detector'. If anyone can come up with a better name I'd love to hear it.

Turning that software off is not an option, because HN would be overwhelmingly more dominated by flamewars if we did so. It's not primarily the individual threads that I fear, it's the systemic effects of having them be more dominant. HN exists most of all for the quieter, deeper, more out-of-the-way finds that would be the first to get excluded under such a regime. That would really be an existential risk to HN.

Incidentally, that last point generalizes. When people complain that we don't do X, for some obvious X, it isn't because we don't value X (e.g. free speech or whatnot). It's because we're worried about systemic effects.

Do you have any quantitative evidence that shows that the moderation efforts meant to minimize systemic effects actually have the desired outcome?

What are the quality metrics?

Well, we have lots of data and we look at it all the time. Does that count as quantitative evidence? I wouldn't say so. I would call it just-so stories with data.

People who ask us about this usually would prefer a world in which all such calls would be free of human interpretation. That's a fantasy, in my opinion. We don't try.

> all such calls would be free of human interpretation

This is a straw man argument. Simply revealing on what basis the decision was made and letting the community voice approval or disapproval would go a very long way.

Consider a title change decision. Most of the time, title changes are minor and reasonable, but once in a while they effectively hide what is interesting about the story from readers. Readers should simply be able to vote on whether or not the title change was helpful, so that mods can learn from those votes how to effectively moderate the forum.

Similarly, it would make sense to reveal any strategies that are used to improve HN such as deducting points from stories, etc, and to make it obvious when this has been done to a story, so that the community can express approval or disapproval of the decision.

I think the main fallacy that the moderation approach embodies is the idea that by simply not discussing politics HN is avoiding becoming political. That is not the case at all. By suppressing or avoiding important political issues, HN is making a very vocal political statement that those issues should be ignored.

Instead, why not bless certain HN users to write comments on highly political articles that will be pinned to the top of the page to give voice to reasoned and discussion-shaping views. This would break the cycle of highly politicized retorts and rejoinders that is what HN should actually be trying to avoid. The key here is to grant more trust to the community, not less. There are a lot of people on HN whose views I deeply respect, and when there is an important issue going on I want to know what they think about it.

Human editorial is fine, but banning/throttling/suppressing users and views is a sinister way to express editorial views. You can frame it as being about manners, but it's rarely actually about manners.

Edit: My account seems to have been throttled for 30+ minutes. Thanks for the mature response.

> Not because we secretly agree with one side or the other but because flamewars are repetitive and therefore destructive of intellectual curiosity.

Just because something is familiar doesn't mean it's not worth exploring. Often seemingly familiar things are misunderstood because we don't take the time to understand them.

> ...what things make the HN ecosystem more rich and complex vs. what things make it dumber...

I think "flamewar" avoidance leaves HN a little flat, actually. There is a lot rich and complex in giving the usual tech/SV crowd a challenge to its viewpoint from time to time. The goal isn't always changing minds or learning new things. Sometimes it's just to realize that smart people can disagree with us, and because of that, we need to respect people that disagree with us.

Maybe we need to let passionate, smart people have it out from time to time so everyone can be reminded which positions can stand up to the flames just fine. Otherwise, we forget that the farces of "them" that we enjoy are just farces, not reality. And that makes us dumber. And boring. And intellectually stale.

If it were a question of letting "passionate, smart people have it out", then sure. Unfortunately that's not what you get in practice on the open internet. What you get are (a) people who want to vent their personal issues for whatever reason, and (b) windbags who think themselves smarter than they are.

These can quickly dominate the threads. That repels the smarter people. This is how we could fall into a death spiral. Worse, the risk grows as the site grows, because then more people are attracted to it for wrong reasons. (Right reason: curiosity. Wrong reasons: hearing the sound of one's voice, venting indignation, or making others do so.)

To sustainably have a forum of the kind you describe, you'd need to close it off from the public internet. We're not going to do that with Hacker News, so we rely on guidelines to prevent the worst. This does come at the cost of a certain blandness, leaving the site "a little flat", as you say. But better flat than dead.

> "Maybe we need to let passionate, smart people have it out from time to time so everyone can be reminded which positions can stand up to the flames just fine."

While it may be enticing to think of a flamewar as a crucible for good discussion, I think that it's far from the case. Fierce, passionate criticism is not the same thing as people talking past each other to attack straw men. There's little time or incentive to sift through the ashes looking for some purified argument that's withstood the flames when you can rush into the next thread in the forum where the a new fire is just getting started. This is pretty clear to see when the same ideological discussions are rewarmed again and again.

I really like Jonathan Haidt's ideas about encouraging people from 2 different sides of an issue but who are both genuinely committed to the truth to battle each other with the intent of letting the truth emerge from the argument. This is extremely beneficial because we are all blinded by our own biases and it is very helpful when the other side helps us to see past them. This is admittedly difficult to achieve in a forum like hacker news but IMHO it would be amazing if someone could make this happen. The biggest improvements to my own predictive model of the world have always come when arguing with someone who held a contrary view and I'd like to believe that I have returned that favor from time to time as well.

In my experience, battling it out us part of the problem. HN already allows people with divergent views to discuss them. Discussion of that sort is enriching, with no winner and no loser. Sometimes views are changed, but it helps to assume the world is not black or white, not even shades of grey, but is a rich technicolor universe and sometimes we run across people who know things we do not who thereby have the capacity to broaden our views.

And battle is not how you get there.

Yes. I can see how that term might have a negative connotation for some people. We do indeed live in a world where most people more highly value their current beliefs and their ego than they do the truth. Those people, unfortunately, battle with the intent to defend their beliefs and ego and that kind of battle is admittedly unproductive. But there are other people, like myself, who genuinely value truth more highly than those things. For us, there is a hunger to get to the truth AFAP, to solve problems AFAP, to accelerate innovation AFAP by leveraging collective intelligence more efficiently because it could mean saving lives or solving really important problems. Currently I know of no forum which meets this need but hacker news does seem to attract a lot of really smart people who do indeed value truth more highly than beliefs and ego.

I quite enjoy a lively debate. Most argument on the internet is not debate. It us ugly and personal and fighty.

I think HN has been a place for lively debate at times. Perhaps it shall be again.

I think that’s highly unlikely.

I strongly agree (though I'd lose the antagonistic term "battle"). See my profile :)

Nice reads.

I have this hypothesis that thinking is layered on top of our two primal emotional strategies for stress: connection and aggression become diffuse mode (how is it similar?) and focused mode (how is it different?). When i use the word “battle” I am suggesting repurposing aggression so that instead of directing it at each other in defense of our positions and ego (system 1 thinking) we are working together synergistically in a battle for the truth which will enable us to solve the problem (system 2 thinking).

i.e. Turning a zero sum game into a positive sum game.

I couldn't agree more. Contrarian posts and comments which challenge the dominant beliefs are often the most interesting because that's where the innovation is. It would be interesting to see, say a contrarian view of a post where down-voted comments actually rose to the top. Because of the way down-voting lowers rank, I tend to view hacker news as "the view of the establishment". It's a shame because there are a lot of smart contrarian people on here, and it would be great if it were easier to zero in on their contributions.

That isn’t what I meant, at least as far as promoting business interests; at least, not beyond nurturing networking here.

As for suppressing critique... well... that seems to be the case, but I don’t see it as unreasonable. Besides, a lot of it falls under other guidelines regarding politics or flaming.

Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t think there is any hidden agenda, and by “dirty tricks” I mean the methods, not the intent. I wouldn’t waste my time here if I thought it was just an elaborate stage show.

> how to maximize the complex-system-interestingness of a public, anonymous internet forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity.

Without knowing what metrics you are using it's pretty much impossible to suggest improvements. I learn the most from reading a respectful back-and-forth that goes on for a few responses and is not just both parties making a single statement.

You can go to your profile and enable 'showdead'. This lets you see shadowbanned posts.

Hacker News is aggressively moderated, that's never been a secret, and the mods will override consensus when they feel like it. That's what many people here like about the site. If you want more free conversation, you can and should go elsewhere. Hacker News just isn't that place, as much as some of us wish it could be.

One person's groupthink is another person's culture, after all.

I think the aggressive moderation creates a space for good conversation. To my mind, it is the only place where free discussion can really occur, provided all involved parties meet the standards for civility, citing their sources, etc.

I have long been able to talk about my medical situation here and my pursuit of unconventional treatment. Doing so elsewhere has been strongly discouraged by the moderating staff. I have never once had an HN mod tell me I need to quit talking about that here. It is the one and only discussion forum where I can have a real discussion about such things and not have it promptly turn into ugly drama, with the forum viciously ganging up on me and mods telling me it is my fault.

The moderation here has given me the opportunity to try to learn to discuss it constructively, in spite of the long history of extreme skepticism and open hostility my situation has received.

Given that many people have outright called me crazy and I have been banned from a few forums over it, I find it incredibly hard to believe that the moderation here has any agenda other than fostering a high bar for civility so that serious intellectual discourse can occur at all, in spite of it being openly on the world wide web and not a walled garden.

It's a really challenging thing to do. And if they were doing anything akin to what they are so often accused of, I think you would see a lot fewer of those accusations because everyone would live in fear of being banned for commenting on it.

If your idea of free speech includes name calling, no, you cannot do that here. The reason: allowing it kills the ability to genuinely have a free exchange of ideas and information.

I spent a lot of time working to fit in here. It did not come naturally to me and a previous handle of mine was rate limited at one time. But these sorts of accusations in no way fit with my experience of the space. I really hate seeing them, yet also recognize their very existence is evidence of how untrue they are.

> If you want more free conversation, you can and should go elsewhere.

Just like people who don't want Trump to be their president should move to Canada, right?

Run from the problem instead of trying to fix it... always a good choice.

>Just like people who don't want Trump to be their president should move to Canada, right?

The US is, at least nominally, a democracy, whereas all websites are essentially dictatorships. It's not even remotely the same.

>Run from the problem instead of trying to fix it... always a good choice.

I'm not suggesting running from anything, try to fix it if you like. You won't succeed, because most people don't consider it broken. Hacker News has a culture which doesn't consider free speech a priority, that's just the way it is.

The US is an oligarchy, which makes your willingness to defend corporations that trample on your civil rights even more unsettling.

>which makes your willingness to let corporations trample on your civil rights even more unsettling.

No... Hacker News' moderation is not an example of a corporation trampling on anyone's civil rights. If that's what you meant.

It seems you're primarily interested in steering this subthread into an uninteresting political tangent, so I'll leave you alone with whatever point it is you're trying to make.

I doubt it's the unpopular opinion but the presentation.

Looks like we have no problems if you write to call attention to something that isn't normally thought about.

Many people cannot do this without getting emotional and insulting though.

> People seem to think this place is better than Facebook, Reddit or all the other vote-based, algorithm-driven discussion forums...

Reddit and FB are largely algorithm-driven; in this joint, things get personal.

So the algorithm is executed on wetware. Still an algorithm. ;)

I'm away on Christmas vacation, but my home IP has been banned. Never been clear why, except that I have expressed some views about banking, Tesla and some well-known posters who like to bully people that aren't part of the Hackernews hivemind.

I enjoy the site as a news aggregator, but this place is an echo chamber.

The same thing happened to me sometime in the last week. My computer was off for several days (christmas), and when I turned it on, I had an IP ban. Using proxy works, but it's a needless hassle. If I delete the cookies, everything is ok, until I click the login link. From then on all I get is 403 on all pages. Annoying to say the least is, that there doesn't seem to be any auto-unban timeout.

And I don't comment all that much. Last month it was a comment every three days or so.

It made me think about the value of commenting for me and I decided to stop posting and lurk. Most of the value for me is in the lurking anyway.

http://news.ycombinator.com/unban?ip=<ip address>

You may have sent requests too quickly or something.

You can contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer if you’re looking for more information regarding your IP address.

Kind of creepy that pro-repeal of net neutrality and anti-YC posts had being deleted.

Deleted is a bad characterization. I guess your comment is about these articles. They are marked as duplicates and hidden.

---

* Why Ajit Pai Is Right (Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II) (stratechery.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800851 (14 points, 29 days ago, 3 comments)

First comment is:

> Is this not a repost? I could of sworn I saw this posted an hour or two ago.

> edit: It is! Here's the discussion from the previous post.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15798960 .

the linked post is an exact dupe and has 211 points, 29 days ago, 295 comments

---

* Y Combinator Quietly Ends Relationship with Peter Thiel (gizmodo.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15726550 (21 points, 40 days ago, 1 comment)

First comment is:

> Dupe; more comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15725108 .

the linked post is very similar and has 185 points, 40 days ago, 147 comments

My bad, you were right, was just a coincidence.

I don't think it's just a coincidence. I think certain topics are more likely to get dupes.

Receiving 500 Internal Server Error

Please pardon my ignorance. What is the point of this? How does it help?

Hacker News has a libertarian leaning ideology among both its community and site-runners. As a result, things like deleted posts, changed thread titles, etc could be seen by folks with such leanings as an impingement on their "free speech" by the site's moderators.

Thus folks want a way to check what has been deleted, changed, or modified by the folks in charge. I imagine this exists to help satisfy that desire.

For an example, note this comment and its corresponding thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16018978

No, the phenomenon is rather that HN readers with strong ideological feelings tend to see the site as dominated by, and the mods in cahoots with, their ideological enemies. This has to be some kind of cognitive bias since the claims people make about HN, and us, are so comically contradictory. If you don't believe me, here are a few typical examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032682

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15585780

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15752730

Plenty more here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=.... It is perennial.

By the way, that thread you linked to shows exactly the opposite of what you say, if you read it to the end. This too is typical, except for the part where the original commenter admirably accepts the correction. That bit is surprisingly rare!

> the phenomenon is rather that HN readers with strong ideological feelings tend to see the site as dominated by, and the mods in cahoots with, their ideological enemies.

I agree, but I don't think that's why this is a popular piece. Such a post would not resonate as well on NeoGAF or ResetERA or even Reddit, but the political leanings of this site propelled this to the front page. There's more to it than just seeing the mods as being in cahoots with enemies. It's the ideology that any moderation is inherently untrustworthy and that the power must be constantly kept 'in check'.

You can find endless examples of folks who feel they are pariahs. I still think that Hacker News has a severe idealogical bend, just like any online community. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that bend matches the mindset of many programmers - techno-libertarianism.

To be clear, I'm not claiming that the moderators have some idealogical bias - I've never come across that. Simply that certain trains of thought are very popular here, and the notion of "free speech" being impeded by aggressive moderation is something that has been rehashed on this site time and time again.

I realize you may have taken issue with my comment because I said "site-runners" in my claim of an ideology. I realize that this was poor word-choice, as I actually meant the YC, not Hacker News - they got conflated in my mind and I apologize for the mistake.

I have seen far more examples of liberals on HN (in the American sense) than libertarians.

It's a mix of ideologies. But the moderation ideology is largely authoritarian, which is enjoyed by both the left and right.

You've entirely imagined that.

Actually your comment is a textbook example of what I described. HN makes this easy, because no matter what you believe about HN, you can always find examples that appear to support it. Not that most people bother to try, or even make the simplest effort at factual truth (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16019042).

Based on what I know about moderation, the penalty on the story may have been overruled by upvotes or reversed by moderators. This does happen occasionally.

And by authoritarianism I do not mean politically authoritarian views, simply authoritarianism applied to moderation decisions (having iron fisted idea police ensuring the quality of HN discussion).

As dang mentioned already, it seems like a good mix. I've seen libertarian, communists, conservatives, anarchists etc. It's one of the few places online where there is a reasonably polite political discourse on topics which touch politics. Yes those articles are sometimes flagged or removed as discussion devolves into insults. It's just that elsewhere it is much worse.

Nice to know who is rate limited. The HN mods don't say why.

I've been rate limited for... years. The fact that HN rate limits some users more than others has rarely come up in discussion, even when discussing HN's moderation practices. It's particularly annoying because if you don't keep tabs on how many comments in you are, suddenly you just can't submit the comment you just spend a bunch of time writing.

My rate limit is about 5 comments in a given 2 hour period, determined through significant trial and error.

That being said, while these rules are not well documented publicly, from my various interactions with the mods, I've come to respect them as fairly reasonable and fair in their handling of the site.

What HN needs to stop is how someone can take it upon their self to reply to half of the top level comments to infect each thread with their world view.

It's one of the most annoying HN phenomena because now each top level thread is dominated by the exact same debate and they get to fight a bunch of battles in parallel. Totally kills the discussion.

The only way 5 comments in 2 hours is acceptable to me is if it was in the comments section of the same submission. I think some people need to be ushered out of the theater so others can participate.

> ...they get to fight a bunch of battles in parallel...

Isn't this what having a minority opinion would look like? It seems like aggressively rate limiting everyone would run the risk of increasing echo chamber effects.

If you can find examples of this I'd like to see them. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is best.

Honestly I feel dumb sending old threads to this address to prove this point, and I absolutely don't want any repercussions on post limits or whatever (considering you have my email and could easily find me). But I might resolve to click that send button before the end of my workday, who knows.

So why is there no report button ? When you can't downvote (I seem to have no comment limit though ? by the way I am amazed that some people with huge karma are limited) and can't flag (I don't even know how that works) posts, you feel rather helpless against incivilities.

Click on the timestamp of the comment and you should get a flag button on the page for that specific comment. If you have enough karma for flagging. I suspect adding the extra click reduces excessive flagging behavior.

Note that the best way to address a perceived problem with moderation or lack thereof is to email the mods. Because while it might take a couple days, you'll get an answer which feels a lot less like screaming into the void than hitting flag buttons, and the mods will also know why you're reporting something because you can explain it.

Generally, I hit it when I'm having a discussion with one or two people in particular.

How can you see who is rate limited from the provided resource?

Edit: Looks like we have overloaded it right now. Maybe it showed that info when the whole application was working.

> Edit: Looks like we have overloaded it right now. Maybe it showed that info when the whole application was working.

It doesn't appear to.

This shadow rate-limiting is so disgusting. The user doesn't know about it, she writes a comment or submit a news and sees a info message "slow down" which makes no sense at all (2 comments per day displays it, yah). A rough mod rate-limited my account, some years ago to only 2 comments per day. And there is no way to recover the account.

HN doesn't support free speech, very unfortunate that pg isn't around anymore to sweep up. It turned from startup, SV and VC news to a popular but unfocused news site, sponsored by whoever.

Sure there's a way to recover it - you email hn@ycombinator.com. Of course, considering you were actually banned a couple of weeks ago, the mods may not be in the mood for unrestricting your account.

As for the site having turned from "startup, SV and VC news to a popular but unfocused news site" after pg left, a quick look at pg's own submissions shows that he didn't think this site was supposed to be all about SV/VC news: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg

Found this interesting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15959986

Generally though, isn't it obvious that YC-backed companies will get some extra perks on HN? I don't see what you were hoping to gain by your 'sockpuppet' investigation.

For what it's worth, based on your recent comment history I do think you've been unfairly targeted. Hopefully this can be resolved over email.

YC-backed companies get precisely two perks on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs and https://news.ycombinator.com/launches.

Does this offer any visibility or insight into the rate limiting of undesirable accounts such as mine?

Do all undesirable accounts get the same rate limit?

Do rate limits expire?

Is there a way to tell if an account is muzzled without trial and error?

(Site is currently down otherwise I would check myself.)

you might want to consider ignoring removal of query parameters for the "recent url changes" section...

Also get 500s trying to link

Is it meant to be that the last listings are 28 days old?

This story was live for < 1 hour before it was killed.

Except it’s still on the front page five hours later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com