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Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

I still read HN. There's a good article or two per day. That said, the moderation needs work. (Or, more accurately, to be put out of work.)

I've been under "rankban" for at least a year, if not longer. This means that my posts, even if they get a lot of upvotes, fall to or near the bottom. I don't really care, and while I could use sock puppets to get around that, I'm too old for that shit and I don't really care. Still, it's irritating.

I've used HN Search (https://hn.algolia.com/) to verify comment karma and validate my suspicion.

I'm also on "slowban", as Hacker News performs worse when I use it while logged in than when I do so in incognito, logged-out mode.

It's dishonest bullshit. My main reason for continuing to comment is (a) to spite the moderators and (b) because there's a certain joy in getting +10 karma even when your post falls to the bottom.

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An alternate explanation would be that your comments are frequently marked as off topic.

(dang has commented about marking his own comments off topic, so the support for that is in there, but I'm speculating about how it might be used.)

Even if this is true, I doubt his comments are undesirable enough to passive-aggressively try to get him to stop using the site by silently slowing it down (if his claim to be on slowban is true). This kind of behavior seems like it should be reserved for trolls and other highly noxious personages.

Yeah, I didn't try to address that claim, I don't have any information about it.

I obviously can't speak to whether MOC is experiencing it, but I can say that with my first HN account, before I understood the context and spirit of HN, I made a very Reddit-esque comment that got me banned. The first part of that was the so-called slowban, as the site was all but unusable when I was logged in.

This was years ago and I have no idea if the mods still use this tactic, but I imagine so in certain cases.

Which makes no sense because michaelochurch has a high comment upvote average and is one of the more prolific commentors. Even if the comments are off-topic, a high average suggests people like them.

They will absolutely put high-voted comments at the bottom of the page. This happened to me when i posted a post with a lot of constructive criticism about a product i wanted to pan out, but which had a lot of problems in countries other than the original country (to the point of threatening human lives). Others agreed, even the makers of the product were happy about the feedback, upvotes happened. Yet my comment is dead last on the page.

I mailed the moderators and one of them confirmed it had been marked "off-topic", and left it there, despite admitting it wasn't off-topic, because he did want to cut down on "negative" comments on new products.

I understand the stance, but disagree with it, and have taken it a fact of life that both the moderatorship, and the userbase at large, are unwilling to consider strong posts that aren't full of praise as worthwhile. I can even mildly understand that, since it takes more effort to verify strong criticism as being grounded, than it takes to verify strong praise. It's disappointing nevertheless.

That sounds like awful moderation - it isn't moderation's role to effectively do marketing for a product. Any good moderator would tell another to stay hands off as long as people are civil.

> because there's a certain joy in getting +10 karma even when your post falls to the bottom

It's possible that the ranking algorithm is actually helping your karma count. I personally only up/down vote comments when I feel they're in the "wrong position". If you made a comment which I found good and it was at the bottom, I would up vote it whereas I probably wouldn't bother if it was already at the top.

'I'm also on "slowban", as Hacker News performs worse when I use it while logged in than when I do so in incognito, logged-out mode.'

While it's my impression (from other comments, &c) that your claim is accurate, this alone isn't necessarily proof. I would generally expect a site to perform better for logged-out users, as 1) it gets to skip any tasks that are for logged-in users only, and 2) it should tend to have everything it needs to render that version hot in whatever caches might be involved...

slowbanning is a thing, I remember an official announcement about it. Of course my memory might be fallible.

Like I said, that's my impression. I'm just saying the differential alone doesn't show it. A tiny differential is expected. A large differential shows either a slowban or poor engineering.

Mine are more than an order of magnitude. If I recall correctly, numbers were around 200 ms in incognito mode and 10+ seconds when logged in.

So either they've slowbanned you, or they're doing something O(n^3) with your long comment history...

The first is certainly more likely for a host of reasons.

Plenty of us read and appreciate your contributions and ilk of ill-fated on HN (not to name names).

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