Lectured at for over 2 years that I knew why I was rate limited. Got told for 2 years that I made “low quality” posts. It gave me a sense on injustice. You be the judge.
So then why on earth are you still on here?? (rhetorical question) Life's too short. Well, some people seem to just enjoy playing the wronged, misunderstood martyr, for whatever reason.
Not much of a rhetorical question, you seem to think you know why I'm here. It's because I personally find Hacker News is quite interesting and insightful. And I have contributions I can make, and the upvotes to most of them seem to show that others think so too.
Ok, so yet again you reply in a snarky, downvote-worthy tone. I guess you just don't realize you're doing it. Your first sentence just isn't a nice way to talk to people. It's got more of a YouTube vibe than HN.
No, I didn't know why, given that "What has HN given you" just produced a list of angry-sounding complaints from you. And by rhetorical I meant, I wasn't asking a question to get an answer, like usual, but to make a point, to suggest something. I was just going by what you'd written. But it's nice to hear the positive side of your experience, not sure why you didn't write any of that initially.
People get up and downvoted all the time. Why would that discourage you? A person can't live life without being questioned. And I'd much rather be questioned by smart strangers (even if I disagree) than argue with significant others.
When accounts post too many unsubstantive comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars, we sometimes penalize the account by rate limiting it, which means the software won't let it post as often. Actually it limits the account to posting no more than a certain % of all the posts appearing on the site.
When people ask us about this we're happy to answer, and to take the penalty off if they commit to using HN as intended in the future. If we don't get that commitment, though, we don't take the penalty off, and we put it back on if they revert to their old ways. This is one of the software tools we use for preventing the signal/noise ratio from getting too low here.
That's very interesting. Thanks for the explanation.
I guess it's not happened to me.
Related question, how come sometimes comments can be downvoted or upvoted and sometimes they can only be upvoted, even though they aren't greyed? I thought it was whether I'd already contributed to the thread, then I thought it was a relative karma thing, but I see later it's neither of those things.
Maybe the delay when you are allowed to reply to comments? I think this is a pretty good idea and certainly has managed to keep me from getting too carried in "heated" discussions.
