Empire by Invitation

Your account has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts when they do this, regardless of their politics or ideology, because it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. I've therefore banned your account. 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 wasn't originally going to ban you—I actually wrote a long comment asking you to stop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34481375. But then I looked closer at your comment history and saw the sort of flamewar comments that we really don't allow here—e.g.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34450818

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34399388

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34399185

Moreover, I asked you to stop already once: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34403887.

It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. Can you please stop? Regardless of which ideology/politics you favor, this is not what HN is for, and it destroys what it is for.

A certain amount of political overlap is ok [1]. But it shouldn't dominate one's submissions or comments here. The primary factor should be intellectual curiosity [2]. Curiosity and battle don't overlap, for the same reason that, say, frisbee and tank battles don't overlap.

When an account is using HN primarily for politics or ideology, that's one line at which we ban the account [3]. We use this test because there's a bimodal distribution between accounts that do this vs. ones that are staying within the site guidelines [4].

Staying within the guidelines also means staying within the range of intellectual curiosity (thoughtful, respectful, friendly conversation) even when the topic is political or ideological.

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."

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

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

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

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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(Edit: I ended up banning this account because its comments were breaking HN's guidelines worse than I originally thought - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34481464. But I'm going to leave the current comment up as an explanation, since it's been a while since wrote one.)