I think the overall vibe is quite different from what it was in 2010 say? It used to be 'post erlang' when there was too much off topic posting, but these days discussions seem to be highly dominated by people who are 'tech adjacent' and have no idea how to code or build products, and no experience outside of big, crappy, late-stage 'tech' companies.

downvotes cause you to be essentially a lite-shadow ban if they happen enough, especially if in a flagged thread/comment. You get rate limited, which means only 5 comments per day allowed. Max.

So, sorry, but while I didn't downvote you, I do disagree with you; entirely. Validly.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...

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> TL;DR: apparently this can happen due to an account being "rate-limited". Rate-limited accounts can post a max of five posts within 24 hours.

See : https://hn.nuxtjs.org/item/15507821

Specifically this bit:

dang 1018 days ago

That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site.

The thread also has interesting discussions on other mod tools: shadowbanning, IP bans, and the like.

Apparently the way to un-rate-limit an account is to send in an email and mention that you will "stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Some amount of convincing prostration may be required, as a sort of high-level turing test. There does not seem to be a way to do this while not giving away your email address (which was not required at signup).

The moderator mentioned something about repeated, human-written warnings before rate-limiting, but this does not seem to be the case now (2020) - rate limiting seems to be a milder, less-known variant of the shadowban.

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