Ask HN: Why are 5 comments/day “posting too fast”, what precisely is “too fast”?

Your account is rate limited. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars.

I'm sorry, I know it's annoying, but it's one of the few (crude) software tools we have to try to dampen the decline of the site. We want thoughtful, curious conversation here, and value quality over quantity in all things.

It's on my list to build a more probation-style system that gives people feedback about how long they're in the bad-dog-box for, and tries to explain which guidelines they've been breaking. I recognize that the current system is limited and when you say it makes you angry, I get it. I'd feel angry too.

I guess in our defense I'd plead that it's almost impossible to keep this place from collapsing, we don't really know how to do what we need to do, the pressures are enormous, and we're limited in resources. (That's mostly my fault, by the way—not YC's—but that's another story.)

> That's mostly my fault, by the way—not YC's—

I don't think you have to be afraid of losing your job - excuse me, of being impacted by the current situation - just now so there is probably no need for such disclaimers, or am I wrong?

Oh, that disclaimer wasn't because I'm afraid of, er, "being impacted". I just don't want to make anything sound even slightly like YC's fault which in fact is my own choice or weirdness. (e.g. the way that HN is limited in resources is mostly the latter, but if I say "sorry that HN is annoying, we're just so limited in resources", by default it's going to sound like a complaint about the org and that would be mistaken.) Getting to choose things and be weird is one of my favorite things about this job and about YC, and I want to be super clear about that and not throw anyone under any buses. I know this is a little vague and hard to follow but I hope less than before!

> Your account is rate limited. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars.

Thank you very much for taking the time to try to clarify things! :)

I say "try to" because your statement still does not tell me what I precisely did wrong?

I unfortunately cannot guess it as I stand by my opinions, like most people do probably.

> I recognize that the current system is limited and when you say it makes you angry, I get it. I'd feel angry too.

Thank you very much for the empathy! Good to hear! :)

> I guess in our defense I'd plead that it's almost impossible to keep this place from collapsing, we don't really know how to do what we need to do, the pressures are enormous, and we're limited in resources. (That's mostly my fault, by the way—not YC's—but that's another story.)

I hear your struggle and thank you very much for the effort you're putting in! Don't be too hard on yourself.

You kept the place running for many years, so it's not collapsing!

How about these ideas:

1) If you want people to change their behavior, you have to tell them whats wrong. All I have been told up to now is that I cannot post quickly anymore. This changes zero about my opinions and how I intend to behave. Because I have no crystal ball, I cannot blind guess what HN disliked.

This isn't even an issue of the Internet, it's a general concern of regulation: If humans do not understand why a piece of regulation is imposed upon them, they are more likely to not accept it.

And don't forget: Moderators are humans too, it is entirely possible that you misjudge something to be low-quality even though it is not - but you will never get a chance to learn why you were wrong if the person you judged cannot correct you because you don't talk to them but just rate-limit them :)

2) Use the tools you have already. You could have commented my original post(s) which caused you to rate limit me, and there told me why my comments are "low-quality" or "flamewars" in your opinion.

Also, HN does have a system which is meant to rate content in a community effort, so precisely what is needed to ease the moderation burden - the voting system! If people don't like my posts they could just have downvoted them.

No need for manual intervention.

And more democratic.

3) This is a matter of personal taste, not necessary a strict recommendation, but: Tell people to change before you punish them. I know it's the new normal on the Internet to punish people right away - I just think this is rude.

My guess - the "too fast" is for activity from your IP # or block, not for activity from your account. But the error message was never updated to reflect the actual code.

Generic advice: Unless you have a paid account, or are officially representing your company, it is usually better to not become too emotionally invested in any on-line forum. HN included.

> My guess - the "too fast" is for activity from your IP # or block, not for activity from your account. But the error message was never updated to reflect the actual code.

I'm on residential dialup, not some kind of company network, so it is unlikely that my IP subnet has a high number of HN users.

If you felt you needed to post this question you should step away from the site and maybe the internet. HN posts aren’t important. None of this matters. Take care of yourself.

> If you felt you needed to post this question you should step away from the site and maybe the internet.

Would you mind reading up on the word "gatekeeping" so I don't have to elaborate it here? :)

> HN posts aren’t important. None of this matters. Take care of yourself.

HN is the only place where it is possible to talk to the people who build the tech infrastructure which dominates and changes our daily lives.

Try talking to e.g. a human at Google elsewhere, it's just not possible.

Internet politics is made here.

You’re attributing way too much value to a HN post. Please, take a break and clear your mind of HN.

Thanks but I think how I allocate my personal time is my personal decision to make ;)

I was asking simple factual questions - e.g. the numerical value of "too fast". So I would appreciate if it could be answered primarily in a numerical fashion, not with life advice.

Rest assured that I do take care of my mental health in a fashion which I deem appropriate.

Then why did you complain about your mental health in your post?

"No means no." - I just said I would please not like this to be derailed into some mental health advice thread, so please accept the "no" to that as such.

There is literally no gatekeeping, the guy is just giving you an absolutely sane advice.

Go out and go bang chicks or whatever. Politics do not matter

And even if they did, no googler or whatver cares about HN comments. Like none at all. HN is just a news aggregator

Wow, what an amazing combination of statements. You're blowing my mind actually.

> Try talking to e.g. a human at Google elsewhere, it's just not possible.

100% yes - being willing to be a human at the end of (almost) every communication is the thing that matters most to us in terms of HN moderation.

> HN is the only place where it is possible to talk to the people who build the tech infrastructure which dominates and changes our daily lives.

Here I start to lose the connection. I don't feel like HN admins are building that. We're just trying to run a web forum. It's true that YC owns HN and YC invests (or tries to!) in the most important world-changing startups, but there are several layers of indirection between us and that.

> Internet politics is made here.

Oh god that sounds absolutely awful. Let's not and say we did?

> Wow, what an amazing combination of statements. You're blowing my mind actually.

I'm not sure if that was meant to sound positive? :|

> > HN is the only place where it is possible to talk to the people who build the tech infrastructure which dominates and changes our daily lives.

> Here I start to lose the connection. I don't feel like HN admins are building that. We're just trying to run a web forum. It's true that YC owns HN and YC invests (or tries to!) in the most important world-changing startups, but there are several layers of indirection between us and that.

> > Internet politics is made here.

> Oh god that sounds absolutely awful. Let's not and say we did?

Oh I was not talking about what HN intends to be, but rather about what it factually is just by the question of who hangs out here.

Factually, it's the place with the highest probability of FAANG people hanging out that I know of.

So as a "civilian", here I have the highest chance to get heard by them.

And here they discuss new technologies and all kinds of aspects of technology which affect people, *and* their opinions on how things should be get influenced here, so this is the "political" aspect.

Sure, they are not legally entitled to decide Internet law, but the way their software works has consequences which can be considered as political and even as "the law" in terms of areas where there is no governmental regulation yet.

Thus HN is the place where a regular person has the highest chance to influence Internet "politics".

And to get to the point: That's why it is so annoying to get locked out of it. It feels kind of similar of losing a small part of Internet "voting" rights.

I did mean to be positive! I know it probably sounded sarcastic.

I'm sorry it's not possible to respond in detail to everything you wrote here and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35224229. I'd like to—but I just don't have the capacity.

The short version is that we have to moderate HN according to the intended use of the site. I don't think your political interpretation is accurate (I think you're overestimating the influence and value of this place) but even if I'm wrong and you're right, we can't change how we moderate because of that. If we did, this place would soon cease to exist for its intended purpose (curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest) and then its influence and value would rapidly decline anyhow.

>Have you considered the possibility that people might get even more vile if they feel like their opinion is being suppressed for arbitrary reasons?

Imma go out on a limb and wager that the person who feels that way should probably step away from the comment box for a bit.

We're all just chatGPT bots anyways.

Can you please imagine this was not the Internet but real life:

If you talk to your friends, and one of them is forbidden to speak, how high would the probability be that their emotional state is NOT affected?

Ordering someone to be quiet is an action which surely will have some kind of effect on their emotional state, isn't it?

This is nothing about me personally, it's just how humans work. Block them in some way and they will get frustrated.

But... we aren't in real life. We're on the internet. I'm probably a bot. You're probably a bot.

You're way, way, wayyyyyyy too emotionally invested in the comment box.

This site is geared towards curious, thoughtful conversation. It doesn't always live up to that goal. But that's the goal. The goal isn't to make people feel good about themselves regardless of how they behave. Talk too loud in a library, and you'll get shushed.

The exact rate limit, to my understanding, is tuned by the moderators. So one of them presumably thought you were making some inflammatory comments and made a conscious choice to slow you down. Reach out to hn@ycombinator.com to find out more and make an appeal.

> The exact rate limit, to my understanding, is tuned by the moderators. So one of them presumably thought you were making some inflammatory comments and made a conscious choice to slow you down.

I have read my comments before the timeout again multiple times before posting this thread here and IMHO they are just stating facts about software, not much of making an opinion about the facts themselves.

I had intentionally left room for other commenters to have their own opinion.

Quote: "As with all things in life, a golden rule applies: If you don't like it then don't use it, that's ok!"

> Reach out to hn@ycombinator.com to find out more and make an appeal.

Uhm, are you actually a human who has read my thread or are you some kind of chat AI?

Because the first line literally says: "Some suggest emailing HN, but I do not have an email address anymore (because they all want phone numbers nowadays)."

Anyway, considering the large number of upvotes this Ask HN has gained, seems more people in the community are interested in clarity. Considering the search function also does not yield clarity it would probably be beneficial for the moderation team and overall peace to make things more clear here?

"I do not have an email address" is not a reasonable state of being. The way you can resolve this is via email, and you should obtain one.

I'm not going to hand out my phone number to internet services, I get enough phone spam already.

Sorry :)

You should be apologizing to yourself. This stance, which I'm sure you see as reasonable (it's not), is directly causing you a problem, a problem that you're here asking for help to resolve (but it's already been flagged). You're free not to get an email address, but you're also the one rate limited to 5/day, so it seems the ball is in your court.

The idiom that comes to mind is "cutting off your nose to spite your face."

I'm sorry, I posted some questions about Hackernews, on Hackernews.

I do not see how I should suddenly become customer to some unrelated external services which could literally cause my phone to ring all day just in order to be entitled to ask some questions?

It seems you're escalating the tone here, which I do not intend to participate in.

But these aren't questions for the community, these are questions for the admins that actually run this place, and there's little to no guarantee they'd even see this post, whereas an email to them would get seen by them. Everyone else here has about as much power as you do to change your account to allow you to comment more.

If you believe your phone is going to ring all day because you have an email address, I'm not sure anyone here can help you. You may need a refresher on how phones work.

> But these aren't questions for the community,

The answers to the questions are of interest to the community so why not have them see them? :)

> these are questions for the admins that actually run this place, and there's little to no guarantee they'd even see this post, whereas an email to them would get seen by them.

If the admins dig deeply enough through comments inside threads to rate limit me, surely they will see a top-level thread.

And indeed: They saw the thread and replied. (dang is their name)

> If you believe your phone is going to ring all day because you have an email address, I'm not sure anyone here can help you. You may need a refresher on how phones work.

You skipped over the part where I said that nowadays it is impossible to get an email account without telling the provider your phone number.

They all want your phone number nowadays, they demand it during registration.

If you look back at the GPs comments you can see some that were flagged/closed recently, a few that were downvoted and also a good number of threads that turned into meta threads with others posters that get downvoted. So looks like someone who has been targeted for limiting or additional moderation.

Can you please tell me what the the "good number" is you're talking about?

I do not have time to regurgitate my own history, but I scrolled over it once and it does not seem as controversial as you're portraying it here.

E.g. I only see one flagged comment, how is that "some"?

You have 600 or so comments here so I only scrolled a 10ish pages, but I spotted at least one of your comments downvoted to the point of being grey, on each page. Sometimes more. That is pretty high, plus the recent flagged post. And now this thread has been flagged. Plus the meta threads.

Pick a random user, check out their comments and see how many of their posts are greyed out, for a comparison.

Have you made side accounts? That is another thing that seems to get people blocked or limited.

As other say, don't take it personally, and don't stress - there is more to life than hn!

>I know these timeouts are a policy decision to keep people from posting angry things

You assume this is the case, but really it's likely more just to prevent people from trying to dominate the conversation.

There's not that many posts or comments on HN (compared to other "social media"), so it's good to let other people to have a chance to chime in, instead of just railroading other participants.

If your comments have merit other people should be able to support your argument. You don't need to be a one man information army.

I think some accounts get flagged for whatever reason and it's used as a punishment. If you create a new account from Tor the problem doesn't replicate so... Go figure.

My guess is that it varies according to the load. Another guess is that the gpt4 thread is draining right now. Disclaimer: just guesses.

>Have you considered the possibility that people might get even more vile if they feel like their opinion is being suppressed for arbitrary reasons?

Sometimes it is a good thing to be slowed down. Gives time to consider ones position, and intention for posting.

I would say that it would be the exact wrong response to get upset at them rate limiting you.

Yep. It's the people who get angry at being rate-limited who need to be rate-limited.

ddevault is correct. Normal users don’t have a limit. Certainly not five posts a day.

Some mod has put restrictions on your account.

I'm not sure this is the whole story

While sometimes it does look like some kind of throttling on your activity, I wonder if it can also be some kind of general throttling (site-wide)

Though the usability of that message could be improved, as for example, you could be given more info, maybe some timing on when you'd be able to post again, or at least something to let you know before posting

He mentioned that he didn't add his email address to his account which could be why his account is limited, to which he said he was not willing to give up because he's had "enough spam already." Just use a fake one.

I'm starting to see the absurdity of this post.

> I'm starting to see the absurdity of this post.

It certainly is absurd to ask some simple questions which could be answered numerically for the most of them ... and then people go into some kind of field day to judge my character based on digging through 10s (!!!) of my comment history pages of 600 comments (someone said that number here, I didn't even know, did they write a script to compute it?), to judge my "emotional investment", and to judge me for not wanting to hand out my phone number to email providers, and finally they block my post by "flagging" it so it won't be seen by the moderation team and won't get an actual answer.

It could have been as simple as telling me "The limit is N posts per M minutes", but no, we must have some kind of public character execution instead.

To find out anyone's posts count just tap on their name and then the 'comments' link - here you go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm

You asked why you were limited, I wanted to provide some opinion as you didn't seem to be aware of any reason that you might be.

Thanks.

For context, here is your original comment:

> If you look back at the GPs comments you can see some that were flagged/closed recently, a few that were downvoted and also a good number of threads that turned into meta threads with others posters that get downvoted. So looks like someone who has been targeted for limiting or additional moderation.

Talking about me in the 3rd person in a subthread (I am here, would you talk about someone in the 3rd person if they are in the same room standing next to you?), to purport vague, unproven statements, which IMHO are exaggerated, and which imply that I'd be someone who "had it coming" is not really "providing" something here, at least not providing help IMHO.

It's rather feels like condescending gossip and badmouthing to me.

I was asking for the numerical limits, not judgement of my character.

But to be honest, I am appalled by the attitude of the comments in this thread as a whole, so take what I say to you personally with a grain of salt, it is biased by the condescending behavior of the other people in here.

Re the third person: I was replying in a sub thread, providing extra context to the thread of the person that replied to you, and therefore was talking to them. Sorry if that offended you, I had initially assumed that due to your block you wouldn't actually be able to comment on this thread, but that proved to be incorrect.

Also in your post here you asked:

"And 5 comments in a single day does seem reasonable, why did I get a timeout anyway?"

I responded to your question of 'why did I get a timeout anyway', and took the time to have a quick look for why you might have been limited, as I've seen here people often don't notice if they had been downvoted or even if DanG has asked them to stop doing a certain thing.

I have 'showbanned' on as an option, so I see the posts of people that have been shaddowbanned - I will often vouch for their posts if they've said something of interest, but usually will look back a little in their history to get an idea of why they were banned. I was about to vouch for a person the other day but a very swift look showed that DanG had blocked them for posting far right and anti gay comments, so even though that post was good, I declined to vouch for it. So having a look at a commenters other posts is normal to me, and I wasn't singling you out - I wouldn't have bothered if you hadn't asked the question I refer to, and to be honest I assumed I'd be helping by highlighting context you seemed unaware of.

There are many forms of comment repression in the HN comments...

I think each post should go at the top of the comments.

When you write a comment, and it appears after 400 other comments, they might as well not publish it at all...

By default each post does appear at the top. It may not stay there for long, though, depending on what else is going on in the thread.

Also, comment ranking can be affected by account penalties. We penalize accounts when they post in ways that break the site guidelines (or the intended spirit of the site), but not so badly that we would ban them.