I don't like the mob thing either but it's how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default). We try to mitigate it where we can but there's not a lot of knowledge about how to do that.
Are there people whose upvotes count for more than others? Or are these actively suppressed? Either way, it makes it hard to have important/robust conversations when the people seeing them gets suppressed
Re the second bit: there aren't any accounts whose upvotes count for more, but if accounts upvote too many bad* comments and/or get involved in voting rings, we sometimes make their votes not count anymore.
* By "bad" I mean bad relative to HN's intended purpose as defined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Relative to that, "bad" means snark, flamewar, ideological battle, etc. — all the things that zap intellectual curiosity.
Thanks for confirming this. There was some speculation last year about partial shadow bans for voting,* and it's good to hear an authoritative answer.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317059
When this happens to an HN account, is it permanent or can it be reversed if the account stops upvoting "bad" comments? If it's permanent, affected users would like to know. Evaluating comments and determining whether they should be voted on can take a long time, and the affected users could save a lot of time if they knew that their votes would never count again.
I know that's problematic because it depends on us seeing things and manually doing them. I'd love to automate it—not just because it would be fairer but because it would be less work for us! But I don't know how to write code to do that.