That would be HN's version of hellbanning.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619641 (and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2620156 particularly) discusses it.

well phrased description from that article:

"A hellbanned user is invisible to all other users, but crucially, not himself. From their perspective, they are participating normally in the community but nobody ever responds to them. They can no longer disrupt the community because they are effectively a ghost. It's a clever way of enforcing the "don't feed the troll" rule in the community. When nothing they post ever gets a response, a hellbanned user is likely to get bored or frustrated and leave."

If you visit this user's page at http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Humourisok you can see that their first 3 comments had negative karma, after which the hellban was applied. I think it is automatically triggered if you reach a certain negative cumulative karma.

I was hellbanned in the past and i was not trolling. I had over 1,000 karma earned in 6 months. My average karma per post was well over 6.

I was not trolling. My posts were not getting voted down, despite often taking unpopular positions.

I was, however, taking a position that one of the moderators of this site disagreed with, and (without realizing it) wrote a response making an argument in response to a post from one of the Y combinator people.

I was hellbanned for disagreeing with the politburo. It was pure censorship because pg, et. al, cannot tolerate people who disagree with them on a political topic. Ironically, I was taking the pro-startup, pro-capitalist position.

Since people are aware of hellbanning, they should be aware that it is used to silence people for disagreement, not just against trolls.

Could you share your prior username? I'm hesitant to believe you because every [dead] comment I've seen so far has been by a user with a net negative karma.

I mis-spoke. My average karma per post was well over 4, not 6. (memory fail.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nika

OF course, I know that by doing this, I'm likely to get hellbanned again...

I wonder why the pnathan was able to see the post then?

Probably had the "showdead" option on in HN preferences.

Correct. I am looking to see alternative viewpoints. Usually all I get is stupid one-liners or spam.

This time it was good.

I probably thought about 3 ways he could use the tech and apply it to another problem. He should not quit, he should pivot his startup. I think there is something here. I for one, will download, install and play with the app.

Word processors already support annotation and change tracking quite well. In the legal community are there still frequent dealings with scanned images (i.e. not the actual doc files)? If so would something like this be more practical than using the word processor functions?

On a moment's thought I'm guessing that perhaps yes, there might be a need for this, as responses to discovery might be in the form of boxes of paper rather than digital files, for the very purpose of making shared review and analysis more difficult.

Maybe he deleted it because he decided to run with it...

"you have an open platform to share and annotate scanned docs." I'd run with that!

Is anyone else running with that?

I mean sure you can annotate in acrobat reader (since Acrobat Reader 9), and sure you can use Flash paper + FLEX like Adobe connect and cozimo.com. But if just received a PDF as an email and I want to send back some comments/ suggest corrections what would I use? Is there a web app for that?

dead isn't deleted.

The problem is, these all have his original problem - clients who take years to decide anything.

B2B is difficult for startups, unless they already have good industry connections. On the other hand, consumers and small businesses are a little stingy.

Well, but it wasn't B2B. He had asked his own school for that relationship so they could market it for him locally - but the service itself is decentralized and in no way depended on that relationship. (It was probably a mistake to wait for them, but hindsight's always 20/20, particularly from the sidelines.)