The situation is hopeless. I've tried. But sometimes I'm asshole, and they expect people to bow to them and speak in just the right way for anything to happen. I started off by trying to be nice, but I rambled a lot. They said they simply don't read emails that long. So I tried short + nice.
I started with a simple request. "Why am I not allowed to upvote anything?" The answer is because I was upvoting too much fluff. Oh.
Ok. I promised to be more careful and judicious. Then I asked "May I have my upvoting privileges back?"
They said "After we see a pattern, and only if you don't bug us anymore."
There are two ways to react to that. One is to be happy that they're willing to work with me. The other is to be disgusted and reject their notion of moderation. I choose the latter. (Unfortunately, that necessitates building an entire clone of HN. So that's what I've been doing.)
Why such a strong reaction? Because this has been going on since late November. This has been a long and epic back and forth between them and me.
Worse, when you open up an email to hn@ycombinator.com, it's because you need something from them. You're only doing it because you're forced to. And whenever I get forced to bow to someone, it upsets me. I can't help it. I want to understand, and I genuinely want to change. But that requires talking to people like an actual human, not as an annoyance you wish would vanish. That appears to be too much to ask.
The result is that most of my emails to hn@yc wavered between angry and upset. Sometimes I wrote things that were deeply unfair to them. Some were simply crazy. I was angry about having to spend so much of my life wondering whether I'm penalized or why I can't upvote or whether I'm saying the right things.
Since they whine whenever I post their emails, I'm limited to only posting mine. Here was my response to "[We'll give you your upvoting privileges back] after we see a pattern, and only if you don't bug us anymore":
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Never mind. I don't answer to you. It's not your community. It's everyone's.
I was looking for mutual understanding. You're expecting subservience.
Nah. I promised to be more careful with my upvotes. I meant it. It's not right to demand proof for such a small request. I already gave you reason to believe I would comply, and my word as a community member.
And since that's a preview of things to come, I will break off my attempts here.
Best of luck, gents.
(That's genuine and heartfelt, for what it's worth. I really do like both of you and wish you success.)
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Then my last email to them, two weeks later (a couple weeks ago):
I think you put on the ranking penalty again.
Inline image 1
If this is true, it's unspeakably frustrating that you won't talk to users beforehand.
Take off my rate limit. Take off the ranking penalty. Give me back my voting privileges.
This isn't even about me. I don't like that you treat your users like this. It's wrong that you keep doing this with no explanation and no recourse. I've met people that have experienced the same treatment.
Further evidence:
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You expect users' comments to get better when you treat them like dirt? Really?
Most people don't even know you behave this way. And there's no way to tell them, because you've ensured you cannot ever speak about HN on HN.
It's been since December that I've had to endure these penalties in one form or another. There's not much choice other than to start writing about this.
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That about sums it up.
As you can see, I've been mostly excluded from the day to day back-and-forth. My comments immediately start at the bottom:
And they stay there:
I'm not saying this was a good comment I just wrote, but if you wanted to read it, you'd have to collapse 10 comments to get to this one.
The most annoying part of all this is that I have no one to talk to. Most people get tired of the topic quickly. Others just apologize for the way the mods are acting and say that they're right, my comments are bad and I should feel bad. Maybe that's true. And then any time I find anyone here to talk to – the only place I've had since I was 19 where I really feel like I can be myself – the thread just gets collapsed anyway and I get yelled at for speaking.
So when I see Upwork or other sites abusing their users, it immediately sends me into "Yeah, I know that feeling" mode.
We have nowhere else to go. Everyone knows HN, so everyone goes here. Think about that. You have no options to even slightly disagree with policy.
I don't think I'll be successful on a new site. There's roughly a 0% chance. But it's the only thing I can do. Between that or being servile, I'll take the nil chance.
Y'know, if someone really wanted to influence my actions, all they had to do was just say "Yo, I hear you, but there are important reasons we can't allow topics like that on HN." Or "This is too axe-grindy, and you've been posting a lot of those. Would you mind restraining yourself?" Or "That was kind of an uninformed opinion. Would you mind putting more effort into your comments?"
I guess they're worried people would flip out if they did that. But it's just the opposite for me. It's a sign that they're actually asking a community member, proactively, rather than hitting them with a stick and waiting for them to notice.
Ironically, whenever users are banned, they get a public reply.
Either way, I don't really matter, so nothing will change. The two ways to change the situation are to shut up and act differently or to become someone who matters. Maybe I'll succeed at the latter.
The thing is, I get it. I really do. I can only imagine how hard their job is. The amount of deftness and thought that goes into every interaction with the community cannot be overstated. Most other communities screw up, but HN has made almost zero tactical mistakes over the last decade. Evidently, their strategy is working.
I just don't like that it's dehumanizing. They treat you like pawns. And if they don't treat you that way, it's because they are nice and cordial at first (I remember those days...). But you better not express anger or send them rants. We live under the thumb.
Annoyingly, even now, I'm wavering back and forth about whether to even post this. I'm torn between wanting to respect HN's goals of intellectual gratification and my own personal selfishness of wanting to speak about this. And then I remember that we are only allowed to talk about exactly the topics they approve of, and nothing else. And then I remember that I had to spend weeks before I even understood the nature of the penalties I was receiving. How I'd try to upvote someone and nothing would happen, and so I convinced myself it must've been a bug or a caching problem. How I really believed that these people were smarter than me and had no interest in psychologically manipulating their users.
Note that although this comment is long, it elides much of the interaction between the moderators and myself. If you want a clearer picture of what precisely happened, whoever happens to read this can email me. But it's really important to me to be portraying accurate portraits – nothing here is exaggerated or unfair. Part of what protects the mods is that everyone believes they are reasonable people who don't have a single bullying bone in their body, so you lose credibility any time you try to suggest otherwise.
The most interesting discovery is that throughout this process, the response has consistently been: We can't treat you any differently than everyone else. In a way, I respect that. But that also implies there are many others in exactly the same situation. Maybe I'll find those people and we can go build a treehouse. It'll be fun.