No doubt the exceptionally high score for this post is primarily down to folk upvoting to check if they have the same problem.
*might... because no-one seems to know how it actually works.
HN has lots of features to help protect itself against spam, sock puppets, voting rings, and more. Maybe you inadvertently tripped something, maybe you've fallen foul of some detector, but there's no chance of working it out when all you say is "It's broken."
I'd argue this whole shadow ban idea is a bit of a dead end, and it should just list this stuff on the profile page or something.
In short, what have you tried? You're really not giving us much to go on ...
Do you write programs for other people to use? What do you do when they say "It doesn't work!" And give you no further information?
http://paulgraham.com/better.html
Spammers aggressively try to game email. Likewise, promoters aggressively try to game HN.
How do promoters try to game HN?
Voting Rings
If you're not familiar with that term, a voting ring is basically a group of people (or robot accounts) that collude to upvote certain stories.
It shouldn't be surprising that Paul Graham would take a similar approach to Voting Rings as he did to Spam.
In one of your comments, you said: "I know it doesnt work because I click upvote and it doesnt assign any points while a friend sitting right next to me could do the same thing and assign points."
If you and another account always seem to upvote the same stories, yet no one else seems to upvote them at the same rate, then it starts to look like a voting ring.
Just like with spam, there will be false positives. I've heard of this happening to folks who have an audience that are also largely HN users. When they send out a new post, then many of that audience upvotes the post, but since it's often the same people, the voting-ring protections get triggered and the post will quickly drop off the front-page.
There are probably many signals that pg uses to detect voting rings. I'm sure they're not perfect, but I'm glad they're there. Otherwise HN would be overrun by aggressive promoters and HN would quickly lose its usefulness.
Advice to promoters: 1) create valuable content that helps users be awesome (no one cares how awesome your brand is), 2) submit it to HN, and 3) don't ask your audience to upvote it
Many promoters just can't help themselves and will do #3 anyways. Just be forewarned that you will likely trigger the voting-ring protections and will be shooting yourself in the foot.
For help with #1, see http://shelby.tv/video/vimeo/54469442/kathy-sierra-building-...
I actually did a semi-controlled experiment a while back and submitted a series of blog posts I was writing, all on the same topic. There were seven of them all together. On four of them, I asked a small number (a single digit) of people to upvote the story. For the other three, I didn't. All four of the gamed stories ended up near the top of the home page. The other three didn't get a single upvote. If you do the math you will find that this is a statistically significant result. (And I have since submitted many other stories. Not a single one has gotten more than one upvote.)
The trick is to get enough upvotes early enough to get onto the home page. It doesn't take much, it just has to be fast. Once you're on the home page, people actually pay attention and you get a lot of organic traffic. But your odds of getting off the new page at all unless you game the system are extremely small.
Some changes that would help the situation:
1. Provide some incentive for people to read the new page. I'm not sure what this incentive would be, but the fact that very few people read the new page is the nub of the problem.
2. Incorporate the submitter's karma into the ranking of the new page to allow stories submitted by high-karma users to stay there longer. Depending on the time of day, a story typically has between 30 minutes and an hour before it drops off the new page, after which it will surely never be noticed.
3. Don't start the timer on a story when it is submitted. Instead, start it only after some time has elapsed (at least a few hours) or it gets its first upvote.
4. Make it cost something (like a karma point) to submit a story. Throttle the cost so that submitting a large number of stories in a short period of time costs more.
Quite probably. If you know a good way to distinguish between such a circumstance and a deliberate voting ring then let the site designers know!
I'd just avoid voting on your collegues/friends' stuff. HN is so highly trafficed that if it was going to get near the front page it would anyway without those few extra votes and if it wasn't it wouldn't anyway even with those few extra votes.
EDIT: Actually, cancel that last bit. I see some of the items on the front page currently don't seem to have many points so a few friends voting could make a difference. Though I'd still refrain as most major sites that include user voting will have this sort of voting ring detection so you will get nobbled at some point.
How do you know your upvotes don't count? Who knows, maybe there's a karma threshold for that too now.
Now, whether this is good or bad UX is up to the admins to decide. I assume "flag" is buried a little bit to prevent abuses of it, just as replying to someone's replies to yourself is delayed a little bit to prevent rapidfire back-and-forths.
Not the way I'd design it to work, but then it's not my site.
I'm not sure that flagging is meant for shooting down topic matter you'd rather not see on HN. And that's why the ability is removed from those who overuse it. Flagging is for blatant spam or personal attacks or other abuses, it's not a content-selection mechanism. Upvotes select content.
Fun fact: if you downvote too many people, your downvote button is invisibly disabled for a short time.
How do you find out about that? Doesn't the 'flag' link show up anymore?
EDIT: Flag only appears when you go to reply to a comment. Corrected :)
An other weird thing about HN: sometimes I can't see the "reply" link on a comment for a while, even if I reload.
Like, I wanted to reply to your post earlier but I couldn't even though ch0wn had already posted his own. I don't understand what triggers that behaviour.
There's (almost) always a reply box when you click the
comment's permalink. So if you click "link" instead of
"reply," you're still good.
in the scholarly sense, not in the everyday sense.
While we're at it, for fun: http://io9.com/5880128/what-scientists-say-in-research-paper...
There were flag links on both comments and stories before they disappeared for me.
An other weird thing about HN: sometimes I can't see the "reply" link on a comment for a while, even if I reload.
It's a feature to help prevent long flamewar threads.
There again, this is not my site.
Do you mean there if a karma threshold on something else? Is it new? I have noticed a marked improvement in HN content in the last two weeks.
There's a karma threshold for downvoting and flagging. Those are not new but I ventured a guess that there may now be a similar threshold for upvoting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242385
(I thought it was in the faq? Did I miss it?)
No idea how to tell if my upvotes 'count' or not.
That being said it might just be a bug somewhere.
Also I've been long suspecting that my downvotes don't work either. I have the arrows and they are clickable, but they seem to do anything. Pretty annoying actually.
So, refresh (to get a fresh page), vote, and refresh again (to see your vote reflected in the score).
OTOH, HN sometimes experiments with karma thresholds and various tricks. So that might be it if the above doesn't work.
Upvote this comment and I'll tell you if it counted.
If you leave a comment I'll upvote it so you can see if you get upvotes.
I'd be surprised if either of these didn't just work.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
if you have a question like this, email us instead of posting on the site.
How is a user's karma calculated?
Roughly, the number of upvotes on their submissions and comments, minus the number of downvotes. (The numbers won't exactly match up, because some votes aren't counted to prevent various types of abuse.)
Not surprised you can't upvote.
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jacquesm
Definitely not a part of any elite.
The thing is, since HN doesn't have a separate "save" feature, upvoting something is the only way to "save" a link for later. And I'm an obsessive bookmarker, so I upvote anything that looks even vaguely interesting, if I don't have time to read it right now. shrug
Also maybe your voting behavior tripped off some heuristic. If I was trying to prevent spam I'd probably disable voting privileges for accounts that regularly upvote submissions that get flagged/banned.
It definitely doesn't when it comes to posts. I believe it does for comments however.
PG's always been exceptionally protective and elusive when it comes to how karma is handled. I assume it's to deter people/organisations from gaming the system.
I've been on HN for years and I still have absolutely no clue how upvotes are handled for posts.
Edit: it seems to work in general.
See http://www.drugssheet.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#cantdownvote
I don't know how high is the current threshold, but I think it's still around 500.
Or any sort of joke.