> Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots).
Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago before I'd submit it again. Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much.
> Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle (pronounced ‘Gackley’). He’s not of asian descent
??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
Call me a fool, but it's never occurred to me that he wasn't. I've always pictured him as a Chinese gentleman, a sort of Confucian scholar in 0s and 1s holding up the mortal world to ancient standards of virtue.
I might come across as reading far too much xianxia, and that would be accurate.
China has not many surnames I think? A little google search showed that dang is one of them.
```
Chinese : The surname Dang comes from a branch of the ruling family of the Zhou dynasty (1122–221 bc) that spread to the state of Jin and the state of Lu. The character now also means 'political party'. German: from an old personal name Tanco, a cognate of modern German denken 'to think', Gedanke 'thoughts'.
```
So I'm guessing if you're from a country where that is a regular surname, you might assume it's like that and not DanG, so yeah I guess that happens
I always thought he was of Vietnamese descent. Today I learned. I'm kinda glad that bit of information was added to an otherwise very mathematical post.
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
I agree, the paragraph is strange and at best reads like a non-sequitur.
Then again I always associated the username "dang" with the word "dang", which I thought it was an amusing (and appropriate) choice of name for a moderator.
> Then again I always associated the username "dang" with the word "dang", which I thought it was an amusing (and appropriate) choice of name for a moderator.
Right; it took me forever to realize that "dang" was "Dan G" and not just a word. Especially since HN usernames can have mixed case, so he could have picked "DanG" (which... I still would have probably read as a funnily-formatted word but it'd be more of a hint:]). Though for all I know he predates HN supporting uppercase in names, and stylistically I can totally see preferring lowercase.
There's been a lot of misguided moderation that happens to be in favor of China. Earlier in the pandemic, the left bought into the propaganda that the lab leak theory etc were racist. I attribute the pro-China moderation to good intentions and ignorance.
That is true; I remember, early on, the lab leak theory (of which I am a proponent) received substantial and fair discussion with significant technical detail, long before it became a partisan thing.
I just assumed he had some intense business interests involving trade with China. He has had a heavy moderation hand when people are critical of the CCP or for example what was formerly thought of as the conspiracy theory about COVIDs likely lab leak origin. He seems to have come around a little bit on this maybe he read about the Uighurs or who knows.
It's true that I/we come down heavily on nationalistic flamewar, slurs, and groundless insinuations about spies and shills and bots and manipulators and all that kind of thing. But this isn't related to China—it follows clearly from the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and is the same whichever country or group is at issue.
Guidelines-breaking comments do frequently appear about China, but that is a function of geopolitical and media trends, not HN moderation. The way we moderate such comments has nothing to do with my/our personal views about China or any other country. If you stop and think about it and you know the HN guidelines well, this shouldn't be that hard to believe. The vast majority of these moderation calls are not borderline.
From a moderation perspective, everything in the above paragraph is obvious. From a user perspective, it's often impossible to communicate, because whenever someone has a strong feeling about $topic, their view about moderation is determined by their feeling about $topic. If they see us moderating something they agree with, they jump to the conclusion that we're secretly in cahoots with the opposing side. Of course the opposing side does the same thing.
I’m hesitant to respond because I don’t know that I can really add anything meaningful other to say that I think one day history will change the way you and others view some of those comments you’ve considered flamebait. Lab leak is one example. I think that’s now acceptable as a topic of discussion amongst educated adults, but it was deemed a “groundless insinuation” at one point and I believe something that would get moderated here, maybe I’m wrong about that. Meanwhile many comments get posted that make fair and strong criticisms of Facebook, or apple or the surveillance state in the USA, five eyes and so forth. I think you and others do a great job of moderating and I’m not trying to argue otherwise, just that I think flamebait is subjective and it’s possible to be overzealous and that criticism of the CCP is no less legitimate than criticism of the NSA, FBI, the prosecution of Julian Assange, etc… I say that with great respect and gratitude for the generally excellent work that you do.
And I agree with you enforcing the flameware rule because if that's not done HN won't be a discussion forum it'll be a cesspool of hate like Twitter or Facebook
OT pretty much — but not completely: My daughter had a wonderful first grade teacher of English descent named Emily Chewning. The kids called her "Miss Chew." On the first Parent-Teacher night many parents were surprised to learn that "Miss Chew"/[Chu] wasn't Chinese.
This thing is that almost any well written (and not too much technical) post can reach the frontpage it only requires 3-4 people who like the post enough to upvote it during the first 30 minutes. As a result reposting works for those kind of content. And as it is not forbidden, people do it
Either I missed it or it does not mention "posting too fast" feature, which is very annoying, because if you commented on something you can be restricted from commenting on another, unrelated topic.
It's extremely annoying. It doesn't give you any indication how you triggered it, nor does it give you any indication how long you need to wait until you can post normally again.
What's more, since the people who wrote the code for this feature are pretty smart, it's hard to believe these two things are oversights.
Edit: In response to a now deleted comment on how this feature is intended to be annoying, because your contribution was deemed harmful, but not ban-worthy, I say this:
I disagree that this approach is correct in that case. If you want to discourage certain behavior, then, on a site such as HN, you should treat your users as adults and tell them what you don't want them to do. Simply locking them out for an unknown amount of time, for unknown reasons, is just going to drive them away. This is just basic operant conditioning. Presumably, driving the user away entirely is not the result one wants a significant portion of the time.
Interestingly, I have never hit this. I heard about it before, and I have sometimes posted a fair number of comments over a fairly short amount of time too, but somehow I've never hit any limit on this.
This leads me to believe that in most (though perhaps not all) cases people are probably posting short comments. Nothing wrong with that sometimes, but overall it's the sort of thing HN tries to discourage, which isn't a bad thing IMHO.
I first experienced it a few weeks ago, coincidentally after I started experiencing some kind of weird, mass downvoting of basically every comment I write. For some reason, this mass downvoting is continuing.
I don't mean that literally every comment I write is getting downvoted to below zero. Rather, I'll write something, it will accumulate a couple to several upvotes, and then, those upvotes all go away over the course of a few more hours, sometimes to be replaced by net downvotes.
The end result is that I actually have less karma now than I did a few weeks ago. And, I wouldn't particularly care about those fake internet points, if the loss of them didn't seemingly come with these weird, arbitrary-seeming restrictions like "you are posting too fast."
TBH, it's getting to the point where I'm about ready to abandon this account.
If you want the rate limit turned off, we'd be happy to do that as long as we have reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future. I'm sorry for the annoyance but we have to do what we can to prevent this place from burning itself to a crisp, and if you want to post without being throttled then we need your help with that.
I can't provide you with that assurance without more specific information as to what exactly I've done wrong. You've removed the punishment so far from the act being punished, then hidden it behind a cryptic error message, so that I have no idea what not to do in the future.
Rather than prostrate myself before the mod team, only to end up having this happen again, I'd honestly rather flush this account down the toilet, go grab a VPN and start again. If nothing else, I'm guessing that would get rid of the random, mass downvoting that's driving me crazy, and it would save us both some time.
Interesting how that page doesn't cover shadow muting. If too many of your comments hit -4 in too short a time period you'll get nothing but "you're posting too fast" messages for several hours, possibly a day.
You get this regardless of score I think. I was excitedly posting on a Dune thread the other day with all comments +4 and still got told to settle down lol.
I have found when your account goes into this "you're posting too fast" purgatory, you can't post more than (I think) five times in some time period (12 hours?? not sure). My account somehow always ends up in this purgatory. It seems like something automatic triggers it and then you have to always E-mail them to get out of it, so I don't even bother anymore.
It's not automatic, it's manual. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. If you keep experiencing this after you emailed us to remove the limit, it must mean that you reverted to posting low-quality comments or (more likely) getting involved in flamewars. Or at least a mod saw it that way.
Interesting, thanks for the explanation. I'd argue that since there is no notice and no feedback as to which particular comment(s) triggered the action, then it may as well be automatic. I've kind of just learned to live with the limit, as I find it a little distasteful to have to keep E-mailing to justify myself, when I don't know what, in particular, got me into the state I need to justify myself out of.
Perhaps the purgatory state could expire after some fixed (weeks, months) cool-down period, I don't know. Just a suggestion.
Something not mentioned in either article is how karma is handled on submissions. 1 comment upvote = 1 karma point, but 1 submission upvote isn't. E.g. this [0] post got 286 points but the submitter only has 118 karma. Also, what's the deal with the "prev" and "next" buttons that just appeared in the last few minutes?
I suspect that I might be part of the reason for the prev and next buttons. HN has bad accessibility when it comes to screen readers and following the parent/child relationship between comments. Some time ago I answered to the wrong person for the wrong reason and a commenter said that they will ask the HN staff for a solution. If my case was not unique, those comments might be the answer. In terms of accessibility, those buttons are not as good as using the semantic html <li> tag, but they help somewhat.
I don't think it is anyone in particular, it is hard for everyone to follow threads where there is an extended subthread. This makes it easy to follow the discussion you care about when a subthread goes on a tangent you don't care about (or flamewar, etc.). I am super excited to see it and would have missed it for a while if not for this discussion.
Edit: Oh yeah, there has been that tiny collapse button for a while, I somehow never got into the habit of using that one and forget it is there. I wish there was a setting to use the words "up vote" "down vote" and "collapse" rather than needing to pixel hunt :/.
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
I don't see how it matters whether he's Asian or not. For all I care, he could be a sentient pineapple tree and it wouldn't matter at all to my HN user experience.
> Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots).
Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago before I'd submit it again. Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much.
> Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle (pronounced ‘Gackley’). He’s not of asian descent
??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...