> The absolute worst thing you can do is to tell that person to shut up and leave the discussion while allowing other people to keep attacking them in some way.
Hacker News doesn't let you respond to dead comments, so this isn't true.
Hacker News doesn't let you respond to dead comments, so this isn't true.
Such a signal is also sent by downvotes without argument, not to mention piling on to a downvoted or flagged comment (people can respond to response to a flagged comment just fine, and can agree with each other about how horrible the flagged person is or what else they probably advocate for, and all that stuff), while that person is rate limited if not shadowbanned.
I can't vote on comments anymore, neither positive nor negative. No clue why, it's been that way since a few months and I stopped caring, just like I wouldn't terribly mind "writing for the showdead community exclusively".
But I know that I upvoted comments that I found reasonable, and unfairly greyed out. So either I was manually selected for that, without any precedent or any communication, or there's an algorithm that blindly removes voting from people who don't agree with the herd enough. Either way, the people who haven't been on the wrong end of the stick much are always super quick to assume that means there's nothing shitty going on. But that has more to do with what people want to believe, not with actually looking into any of it.
Can people actually do that? I have rarely, if ever, seen this on Hacker News, and I feel like anything like this would be a good way to be downvoted or flagged yourself.
> I wouldn't terribly mind "writing for the showdead community exclusively".
You're not alone: there are a number of people who do this already.
> But I know that I upvoted comments that I found reasonable, and unfairly greyed out. So either I was manually selected for that, without any precedent or any communication, or there's an algorithm that blindly removes voting from people who don't agree with the herd enough.
I wonder if this was supposed to be a nudge to use the "vouch" feature instead? Even if it was, it wasn't a particularly good one. Maybe the moderators could tell you why you can't vote if you emailed them?
We're doing it right now, the top level parent comment was dead before I made my first reply to you.
> Maybe the moderators could tell you why you can't vote if you emailed them?
HN could also have a feature that allows mods to communicate with users. I'm not going to use my main email anyway, and making a throwaway email for that is no more "community-like" -- it's just a hoop I don't see any reason for jumping through. Being transparent about moderating, and discussing such things in the open rather than behind closed doors, is a courtesy so basic for my sensibilities I won't beg for it from those who don't give it freely.
Don't bother suggesting innovation in HN, it hasn't been updated in 10+ years, and for some reason they're proud of that fact.
HN is regularly being updated and improved. The ability to vouch for dead comments wasn’t here 10 years ago. Undoing accidental downvotes wasn’t possible. Moderation was much less active back then too, and it shows, detaching comment threads/moderating titles have been two great additions keeping the quality of discussion high even though this place has hundred times the amount of active users as ten years ago (I’m guessing)
No it's not, nor is it growing anywhere near what you guess it's growing at. I'd guess it's stagnant or even dying a bit in 2019.
Dang, do you perchance monitor any habitual downvoting of users by particular other users?
edit: lol, downvoted within 2 minutes. Here, I'll make it easy for you mysterious friend, here's another new one for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21545859
Could you please stop complaining about downvotes in HN comments? As the guidelines say, it never does any good and it makes boring reading. It's a perennial weed of offtopicness.
- the topic of the article
- the amount of other people in this thread complaining about patterns and justification for downvoting
- I had been downvoted multiple times for literally asking a perfectly reasonable question (on a topic that one cannot learn by RTFM)
- I am regularly downvoted for asking clarifying questions of people who say things that are clearly not true while implying I am saying things that are in no way reflected in the actual text, or have been chosen "at random" and warned about engaging in flamebait in threads where numerous people are doing the same or worse than me, the primary difference being I often happen to hold a minority opinion, in a discussion about opinions (something an increasing number of people struggle to differentiate from fact)
....I didn't think it seemed all that unreasonable.
I realize I'm not a model forum participant, and I know you have a hectic and thankless job, but I think it's fair to suggest the possibility that ideology plays a bigger role around here than is optimal, and recognize that all people (including you and I) suffer to some degree from ideological filtering in our judgements. HN having guidelines is a fine idea, but might some common behaviors (say, blatant dishonesty) on this site have varying visibility depending on the observer, and have reached a frequency that may be worthy of reasonable guideline modifications in order to maximize quality of discourse?
/rant
I feel quite certain the error message does not match the source code, I suspect it is downvote based, which at times (certain subjects) basically equates to agree with the status quo or be silenced.
Now that I've read further comments in this thread, I now know that rate limiting is manually applied per account, something that afaik has never been explicitly acknowledged before, and is certainly not acknowledged in the deceitful (at least partially) error message: "You're posting too fast".
It's interesting how human judgement of how appropriate/ethical rules and procedures are is often altered by whether or not one is part of the ingroup. In a generic conversation, say on software design principles, I suspect most people would certainly say that objective honesty/correctness is something to strive for, but when the conversation is in this particular implementation, I bet opinions would change.
Another interesting related issue, something one might notice that isn't in the HN guidelines: "Try to be honest; try to speak truthfully." I've suggested this before, but apparently it wasn't deemed important enough, which seems like quite a shame to me because it has become quite a common behavior on HN.
Of course, these things aren't surprising, but they are interesting.