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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

> ...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.

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.

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.

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

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