While I know how hard these people work, I really cannot support your enthusiasm. The users are often banned at slightest opportunities and they are not even informed what they did wrong or the fact that they just got banned. They would just get dreaded “your are posting too fast” error and all their future posts and comments are automatically de-ranked forever with no recourse or appeal to these higher powers. I felt this was very similar to being placed on no-fly list which we as hacker community deride so much as infallible authoritarianism.

As HN community is more and more becoming group think (watch how this post will be downvoted) and laying these extra layers of super powers punishing anyone ad hock doesn’t help. In few posts when I wrote non-popular opinion very respectfully these folks expressed their displeasure. Mods should NEVER do that.

The sign of such required moderators is indicator of how broken the algorithms driving HN. Instead of fixing these fundamental tech issues, the powers behind HN have doubled down on exercising heavy handed dictatorships. The least they could have done but never have bothered is to at least tell people they punish what they did wrong, how do they fix it and get back in community. The best they could have done would b ego open source HN and have honest discussions about various issues we have as community so more brain power is available to solve these issues. That’s the hacker way.

Update: Great! Group thinkers are already getting busy at casting downvotes.