I apologize for submitting a duplicate. I wrongly assumed that I would not be allowed to submit a link if it had not garnered attention within the last year or so (now I know 10 months is not "the last year or so") by an automated system. I did not realize that this was a responsibility of the moderator and I am sorry for any inconvenience I may have caused.
No worries and no need to apologize! The software catches some, users catch some, mods catch some, and the handful of dupes that end up getting through are basically harmless.
> Accounts which are less than 2 weeks old will appear with a green username.
I believe this is actually calculated using the date of the submission they have posted / commented on, instead of the current date. I've seen posts from 2010 where some people's comments have green usernames.
Every time this is posted I wonder why it doesn't cover shadow muting, where you're blocked from commenting for a while but only a see a "posting too fast" error. I thought it was automated but it's been claimed to be a manual decision.
There are other behaviors I've observed but haven't confirmed. For example, highly controversial comments seem to sometimes be manually set to a point value of 1, even when they have dozens of replies making the real vote tally very unlikely to center on 1.
I want to echo what a [dead] sibling comment is saying:
It's a problem that you get the "posting too fast" error only after you have typed a comment. Maybe a long and well thought-out one that took a lot of time and effort.
I've had cases where I've saved the comment in a .txt and gone back to post it later, but of course the discussion will have moved on.
I think the site should not even let you start typing if you are going to get the "posting too fast" error.
There are some not on the list that have issues filed to add them. Once example is that Hacker News has full shadow banning, and there are some choice words for dang's moderation there.
Shadow muting isn't directly related to how fast you're posting, but how many of your comments are downvoted within a certain period of time. If your comments are well-received you can make much more of them in a given span than if most or all of them are downvoted.
No doubt it's the worst solution, except for all the others. We have few software tools for dampening the descent of this place into flamewar. If HN burns itself to a crisp, what good does that do anyone?
I do think it can be improved by making it more of a probation system that explains what's happening and how long the probation period is, presumably with some sort of exponential backoff so that over time probation converges to a permanent penalty. This is on the list to implement.
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. If an account is doing a lot of things that damage HN for its intended purpose, obviously we have to do something.
> If you want post limits, enable them for everyone.
That would be inconsistent with optimizing for curiosity [1]. There are heaps of users from whom the more comments HN is lucky to receive, the better.
It would be great if admins had a way to tag the "low-quality" comments that triggered the rate limiting, so people can kind of learn by example. Like "Please slow down and stop posting things such as <link>, <link>, and <link>."
This rate limiting seems to happen to me quite a bit, and when I've E-mailed, it's "Hmm, you look like you're posting fine now. We'll remove the limit." Leaving me scratching my head, searching in vain through my comment history for anything that might have plausibly triggered the action.
I agree with your first point. People learn from feedback, so it would be better if we could give more precise and structured feedback. This is a longer term goal.
It's hard though because everyone who asks a question wants a detailed answer and detailed answers take a lot of time and energy, adding up to way more time and energy than we have available, or could ever have. We do our best, but it's a hard constraint problem.
What's the purpose of links like that in your moderation comments? I click on them assuming they'll lead to additional explanation, but they're only ever showing that you've used some particular word or phrase before.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be taking away from that.
They do lead to additional explanation—usually lots of it. For example, if you follow the link I just mentioned (here it is again: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), is it really not obvious what the point is? The point is that we try to optimize HN for curiosity and that this has interesting consequences. You do have to scroll back through the search results to find the good explanations, but that's not so hard.
One thing I intend to do eventually is compile those past explanations into a set of commentaries that could be linked to in the future. For now, the genres through which I explain this stuff are (a) HN comments and (b) emails, and I can't link to emails, so you get past HN comments.
It's really no better than providing a link to a google search when someone asks for an explanation. You'd call that unsubstantive when a user did it, and it's unsubstantive when you do it.
I don't think that's fair. A google search isn't necessarily unsubstantive—it depends—and the HN Search links I post are all pointing to consistent explanations.
We're not enamored with rate limiting. By temperament I'd far rather not penalize anybody, plus it would be a gift from heaven to be free of the enormous number of demands it leads to. (We could ignore the demands, but that would be bad, so we don't.)
We do it because it's one of the few tools we have to try to prevent this place from destroying itself. Most of the other tools (such as replying to comments) take enormous much time and energy. It's necessary to have at least a few measures that can be done in software.
I wish that everyone complaining about this could realize the irony of the complaint: one of the reasons why the thing valuable enough to be worth complaining about exists in the first place is measures like rate limiting. But I know that's too much to ask.
As someone forgets his password often and has to create another account. Half the fun is making it to 500.. once you hit 525 it's hard to slide back under if you act semi-responsibly.
It's easy enough to get un-rate-limited. Just build up a track record of making substantive, curious contributions—that is, of using HN as intended—and then ask us at hn@ycombinator.com. It's not as if we're unresponsive (although the inbox does have poor worst-case latency).
Actually we often take rate limits off accounts without being asked. It's a matter of looking through the history and seeing if the account has stopped taking threads further into flamewar and/or is no longer making a habit of unsubstantive comments.
There's a list of colours people typically use, too![0]
I personally use #3882cc. Played around with lots of different colours and that's the one I ended up on. After finding [0] not too long ago, I tried some other colours and ended up going back to this one. They just looked alien to me since I've had this one for what feels like forever.
I've been using #F6F60 for a while now, since it makes the top bar the same color as the background. It is only a problem when you are on a page like /newest where the text in the navigation bar at the top of the current page turns white ("new" in this case) to indicate that you are not on the homepage. The lack of contrast makes it almost impossible to read.
it's worth noting that the "second-chance pool" doesn't have any kind of hard timeout on it–two days ago I got an email invitation to repost a link from five months ago (reposted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30438015), and when I asked why, dang explained it was because he was looking to send a second-chance resubmission invite for another, unrelated submission, chose another duplicate of something I submitted, and then went on a rabbit-hole that ended up with him coming across a different submission (the one linked above) from my account. I think that's pretty cool, and I had no idea it worked like that.
I use RES on reddit, and I really miss having the ability to navigate through comments with j/k, nav to parent with p, enter to collapse, etc. I wish they'd add that on this site!
Reminder that it's a GitHub repository so anybody can post pull requests (I did so for the list of URLs of user-generated content when I was working on an HN scrapper)
I often flag discussions not because I agree or disagree with any particular aspect of the post, but because the discussion itself has turned unproductive and is unlikely to change. I think that's one way flagging is supposed to be used, technically. I give people the benefit of the doubt that they are doing the same thing.
If there's a place on the internet where people can discuss all topics without it turning into a flamewar, or a series of people just saying things near each other without actually discussing anything, I would like to go there instead of HN. But those places are increasingly rare on the open web!
It’s not that people are against diversity and inclusion.
It’s that they are against the insincere and awkwardly forced pushes for diversity and inclusion by companies. Forcing behaviors and pushing insincerity leads to noncompliance and resentment.
The best type of diversity is, and always will be, organic.
And when organic processes produce no diversity, what then? Throw our hands up and call it insincerity on the part of anyone who decries the situation?
Jokes aside, the answer to that question is highly circumstantial. If you live in a very culturally/racially/ethnically homogeneous area, there probably won’t be much of a push for diversity because the place isn’t diverse by nature.
Lack of diversity is not the problem that western society, namely the US, would have you believe.
> If you live in a very culturally/racially/ethnically homogeneous area
What a crock. I don't mean to play identity politics but I can't imagine someone who isn't a white man saying this. I've never seen a tech team with a reasonable gender split, and I can assure you no one is living in a genderally homogenous area.
Lack of diversity is a humungous problem in western society, and while I agree the place to address that may not be a company trying to execute merit-based hiring, it's clear if an entire system outputs only one category of person as successful, that system has deep biases and would be ripe for improvement by including other categories of person.
In my experience those with knee-jerk reactions like this to hot issues with heavily echoed (in mainstream/social media) "right" and "wrong" moral stances are very impressionable. Perhaps investigate further before fleeing.
over 200 comments
(Arguably a dupe, as it's been less than a year)