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Comment by baroffoos | Hacker News Reader

I fell in to the karma trap on reddit years ago and I ended up trying to conform to trends to maximize my karma. Its a really boring way to use a website and I found myself not saying a lot of things because I know they will be downvoted and I will lose my internet points. These days I don't give a shit about karma and I say whatever I want. I feel better about sharing opinions and I say what I really think.

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I went through the exact same arc with Reddit. Once you reach a point where you have say 100,000+ karma, no downvote can ever really touch you anymore and you can start being honest again. If in addition to that you don't care about being banned from certain subs, well, congratulations, you're once a again a free man!

My original account has been banned from hundreds of subs. The vast majority of them I had never even been on before and was bot banned because I commented on a competing sub or something. These days I just make up a random account every month.

some subs like offmychest ban anyone with a submission history to political subs like kotakuinaction as they perceive that someone with links to that subreddit cannot possibly contribute in a constructive manner. whether they are right or not is something only they as mods can perceive.

it is actually against reddit rules to auto ban users like that but it is part of the increasing number of rarely enforced rules on reddit

HN will shadowban your account if you dont conform to popular opinion enough

Aside from saying unpopular things, a net negative karma will also do it, which is a reflection of the same outcome

Always check your post history from an incognito browser to see if others can see it

90% of the stuff I post is upvoted but I don't care if one opinion I stand behind is downvoted. I also create a new account every month so that probably wont affect me.

Isn't that against the rules, if not then I should do it, I just realised I was shadow banned 4 days ago and posted like an idiot

You can also email us to get unbanned if you want to use the site as intended. We're happy to unban people who give us reason to believe that they'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How is one to email to get unbanned if one is not aware of the ban? That’s the whole POINT of the shadow ban that HN implemented. One little mistake (or two word post in OP’s case), and you’re shouting at the wall.

So with due respect, Kafkaesque suggestions to contact the mods don’t help. What would help is getting rid of juvenile practices that are arguably ineffective, i. e., shadow bans.

We usually tell people that we've banned them. There are exceptions, mostly for spammers and serial trolls.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=we%27ve%20banned&sort=byDate&d...

That's against the rules, so please don't: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Plenty of explanations about why: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

the alternative to an automated one click action is a lengthy approval process...no one is going to follow this. it is trivial to create a new account. considering the userbase of this site it is even weirder to have shadowbans considering it is trivial to check and then change usernames/IPs.

also the semi-noob phrase is showing the age of that document

I'm afraid I do not see this part of the rule explained enough. Why is the identity important there? Wouldn't the content of the messages suffice? Often I do not even look at the name of the poster.

They're saying identity is important because only relating to an identity creates a community. But that's wrong of course, as many anonymous communities prove. I don't recognize 99% of the posters here either; it is indeed the content that makes the community.

I believe the real explanation of why identity is important to them is a bit of social psychology. The theory is that identifying with people makes them less mean to each other. So they probably want consistent identities so people will be more civil, which is one of their stated goals.

So people can judge you by your previous posts.

In the search link I posted above, there are lots of explanations of this, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996295. The point is that HN is a community and a community consists of people relating to one another. The fact that you can pick whatever name you want and it needn't be your real one doesn't change that.

It's also the way HN has always worked. A collection of nameless posts would be a very different kind of forum. Anyone is welcome to start one, but not to turn this one into that one.

> HN will shadowban your account if you dont conform to popular opinion enough

Bollocks.

Sometimes unaccepted observations can come across as wildly outlandish or insensitive depending on the topic, and initialize the fallible moderators as well

While other things conform to the prevalent opinion and masquarade as insightful high quality comments

there is a reason we can still see the now-laughable criticisms of dropbox

> the now-laughable criticisms of dropbox

But was it really?

It certainly wasn't a high-quality comment, it was too negative and arguably mean.

But the "failure" of the comment was merely a failure in correctly evaluating the business value. Something most of us have done many times in our "forum careers". Just think about all those comments that amount to not much more than "if you don't use the command line, you're not worthy of using a computer".

On a technical level it was fine. And remember, Dropbox in this very first stage was a very different beast from today's Dropbox.

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