Nobody "stifles talking about the rules". We answer questions every day.
When we ban an account, we don't use shadowbanning it unless it is relatively new and shows signs of spamming or trolling, or being related to past abuses [1]. When an account has an established history, we say that we're banning it and why [2].
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars [3]. We're happy to take the rate limit off (and often do) when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to do that.
Creating accounts to get around these restrictions is obviously a repetition of the original abuse and will get your main account banned as well if you keep doing it, so please don't do that.
the fact that you don't inform users of shadowsbans an rate limiting without due process is pretty stifling. it's the reason i have this account, as I'm sure you know.
It's very clear that this is YOUR community. I don't think that's a bad thing, community wise. Just own it. It's OK. Being dictator-like isn't bad if you have clear goals and limited scope. It's just unfortunate that one of your goals is to squelch those who have unpopular opinions. And I'm not talking about neo-nazi white supremacy bullshit, it's clear you support that edge.
People who don't want to admit that we've banned (or rate limited) them for breaking the site guidelines always strike a noble posture as "those who have unpopular opinions" and accuse us of secretly siding with their enemies. The commenters you accuse us of supporting say exactly the same things and then some. They certainly don't think they're "supported".
The tell in comments like this is that they are linkless. Supplying the relevant links would reveal the rest of the story and let readers make up their own minds. That's why they're conspicuously missing.
When we ban an account, we don't use shadowbanning it unless it is relatively new and shows signs of spamming or trolling, or being related to past abuses [1]. When an account has an established history, we say that we're banning it and why [2].
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars [3]. We're happy to take the rate limit off (and often do) when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to do that.
Creating accounts to get around these restrictions is obviously a repetition of the original abuse and will get your main account banned as well if you keep doing it, so please don't do that.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...