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Comment by 908B64B197 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting you are getting rate-limited for showing this.

There's no rate limit on that account and I have no idea what was happening there.

Hi dang, my mistake on the diagnosis, then. I thought that because I saw an error message that said " Sorry, we're not able to serve your requests this quickly." and after that the edit button was no longer visible for me on my comments. I often access this site through a ProtonVPN connection, so maybe there was some suspicious IP address heuristic involved?

The edit button is still not showing up for me, though. Do you have any idea why that might be or if there's something I can do to fix it?

Imgur screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/ZEWIJeW

Edit: Was there a thread-level edit ban or something? Because I can now edit this post.

https://imgur.com/a/b7H00ny

"Sorry, we're not able to serve your requests this quickly" is our little server process saying "help, I only have a single core and I'm out of breath here". If your account were rate limited it would say something like "You're posting too fast, please slow down."

Users flagged that comment.

Ah ok, thanks for the prompt reply and I really admire the moderation work you do here!

I get rate limited on mobile all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.

I'm under the impression that rate-limiting is manually applied by the moderators on a per-user basis.

*edit: Ironically I've been rate limited and can't continue this conversation, lmao

It is really sad that our knowledge of these policies is limited to guesses and rumors, and that there is no public log of moderation actions.

Honest question: why is it sad? There’s another thread[0] going on here right now about how human processes shouldn’t manage pathological cases with policy and procedure. Moderation is all about pathological and edge cases. Mod actions that work on some users every time may not work at all on others. I don’t believe treating us all the same is the best way to get quality discussion, and transparency is not an end in itself outside of government.

So how… how would a moderation log and strict policies make HN a better place?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30340588

rate-limiting is manually applied by the moderators

Given:

1) HN was started by / is moderated by "computer nerds" (IMO you're hardcore if you write it in lisp)

2) 'dang' is the only acknowledged public moderator (some small? number of additional secret moderators also exist)

It follows that:

It's difficult and doesn’t scale to "manually" apply rate limiting. Most / all such action is highly automated.

At least that's my wild, possibly way-off-base guess.

What gives you that impression? If we're talking about the same thing, rate limiting occurs when you post multiple comments right after each other. It will usually make you wait a minute before the next post.

This doesn't happen to me often, but does happen when I comment in rapid succession.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com