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.