How I Was Unbanned from Hacker News (2013)
aha.io
aha.io
A human would have also found that obnoxiously self-promotional. dang simply treated the author really nicely.
However, there is still, and likely always will be, a serious ideology, knee-jerk reaction problem from mods personal opinions. It's probable they don't even know they're doing it, but my gut tells me 50% of moderation here is personal. It's using a rubber hammer to hit a nail, and I encourage everyone to look at comments dispassionately.
If you'll please excuse me, IMHO, one person deciding that a post is offending, especially on controversial topics, is a problem. I say let the people speak, and then let the votes, and the community, speak for itself.
Well, how about some charity here?
They expected profanity, trolling, porn, ads, bad content, etc. to be banned, not their legit submission. "Posting multiple times from the same site" didn't occur to them as an issue, and it makes sense, since they had already done that with no issue before.
>Post is also 8 years old so who cares?
Why, did anything change to render it obsolete? People don't get banned on HN anymore? The story stopped being amusing?
> So, the lesson is that sometimes when technology fails us and algorithms go wrong, humans can step in and make things right.
So sticking to my original point, something more aware would sound like: "Oh, I see how my activity could have been perceived as spam. Luckily humans can step in and help when algos are overly aggressive".
The fact that they're so quick to dismiss this issue as purely the technology's fault is what irked me. I think it was fair for them not to know ahead of time.
In my case I couldn't log in, because of a captcha, which I didn't even see.
He sent me a kind reply to my query about what's wrong and fixed it very quickly by whitelisting my account.
Absolutely amazing for a tech company.
I think a Thank you! to the mods in general is in order. They do an awesome job under sometimes very difficult circumstances.
And while we're at it.
Happy New Year to everybody!
E: Clarification
When people say "algorithms gone haywire" that generally implies a machine learning or adaptive algorithm of some sort, this sounds like a hard coded "if X amount of submissions from the same URL, ban" type of thing. That's not even really a computer issue, that's just the way a human decided to make the system work.
Same is true with humans and human processes. If one human sets the policy for another, be it a legislative body setting policy for an executive branch, a managerial body setting policy for a customer service representative, etc, is it the customer service representative's fault that the policy is that way and they have to do something they know isn't logical or great in the situation? No.
When you are herding sheep or in this case herding spam bots and scammers mixed in with probably 10-20% legitimate users, you have to make some tough calls to try to optimize the content on the site to make it usable for real people.