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Comment by salemh | Hacker News Reader

7 pointssalemh5 comments

We've banned this account for using HN primarily (in fact, it seems like exclusively) for ideological battle. That's not allowed, regardless of what you're battling for or against, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I personally find posting a link to a peer reviewed scientific paper to be useful regardless of author's motivation.

If ideology is the issue then 1/4 of the article posters on HN should be banned. Also, many stories every day fall under “off-topic”. I am all for rules, but what is the point if it’s cherry-picked? I see this user’s past post have some related topics, but also has a very wide range of topics they have posted. Could we all get clarification on this?

(*no idea who the poster is. Purely referencing the admin comments here)

The issue is using HN primarily for ideological or political battle. That is obviously not compatible with the site's mandate, which is intellectual curiosity. We've noticed that accounts fall into a bimodal distribution between ones that are doing this and ones that aren't—with surprisingly few borderline cases–so we actually use this as a test for which accounts to ban.

It's not cherry-picked. The standard has been well worked out over time, is stable, and doesn't have to do with the specific ideology or politics someone is battling for.

If you want to read more about this, here are some links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

This article doesn't answer the question.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com