Hacker News Guidelines

I understand why but I don’t like how people are individually rate limited silently without their knowledge. It is certainly immoral

EDIT: unfortunately I cannot defend my point in the comments, as I am now rate limited :)

EDIT 2: /u/Dylan16807 yes I'm seeing that. When I try and post it says "you are posting too quickly, please slow down"

When I was rate-limited, I found it quite easy to find out what happened after a little bit of googling and get it reversed with a nicely worded email. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why you can't really post after a reply from dang.

Nonetheless, I agree they could be a bit more explicit about this.

> It doesn't take a genius to figure out why you can't really post after a reply from dang.

Well actually it does because you're wrong about this, it isn't about him replying to you, he manually sets a flag on your account.

> Well actually it does because you're wrong about this, it isn't about him replying to you, he manually sets a flag on your account.

Right, but in my experience, this usually occurs after a reply.

You said it doesn't take a genius to work it out but you haven't worked it out. It's opaque other than that we know it's a flag that can be manually set on the user without their knowledge

I worked out that I had been flagged. I was not saying that dang replying was the mechanism, you are just (intentionally?) misinterpreting what I am saying. That dang replies to you is an indicator that he has flagged you.

Not going to keep replying, as I suspect that a conversation between two people flagged in this manner is one of the likeliest to turn flame-y :)

I don't think it's immoral - it's their site, after all. Our being able to post here at all is a privilege afforded to us, and their choosing to revoke that privilege for any reason is fully within their rights. No cause or explanation is even required, though they are frequently provided out of the abundant courtesy that the moderators seem to have a natural talent for. If you think about it, even rate limiting is a slightly more courteous alternative to outright banning someone.

I think shadowbanning is a bit unethical as it technically involves lying, but afaik HN doesn't do such things.

Unfortunately, that reply can sometimes be days, weeks or who knows how old, and HN doesn't inform you of replies to your comments, so unless you happen to see it when it happens you're stuck with having to intuit that "you're replying too fast" is an extremely passive aggressive flag on your account and not just a general site-wide rate limiter. Or notice that your flags no longer work, or your vouches no longer work, or any number of even more subtle effects.

> immoral

That's really not the word you're looking for.

What principal of morality does rate-limiting a commenter on one's site violate?

It's precisely correct.

> I don't think it's immoral - it's their site, after all.

> I think shadowbanning is a bit unethical as it technically involves lying

These two points contradict, and also HN does do shadowbanning ("marking as dead")

>I think shadowbanning is a bit unethical as it technically involves lying, but afaik HN doesn't do such things.

It does. A ban on HN is a shadowban. You can still post but only those who have "show dead" on will see it (greyed out and marked dead).

While shadowbanning has been made political, it is a key tool in managing a community. If you ban a troublemaker, they just make a new account. So if you can isolate a troublemaker without them understanding what's happening, you improve the community and reduce the whack-a-mole game.

And ultimately, "freedom of speech" refers to the government silencing speech, not private companies/private websites. We are all guests here, and if someone isn't upholding the standards the people who run this website want people to uphold, then they're free to do whatever they want.

>Or notice that your flags no longer work, or your vouches no longer work, or any number of even more subtle effects.

Wait, I'm now wondering if I've been limited. I've never once seen the "Vouch" button and I've flagged some blatant stuff that nothing happened to, but figured there was somewhat of a vote (or multiple flags) before it took any effect. Can anyone confirm this behavior?

Your account is fine.

Thank you for the confirmation, dang! Big fan of the job you do around here.

Shadowbanning is when you don't tell the user that they're banned. When an account has an established history on HN, we tell them we're banning them and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Shadowbanning is something we only do for either (1) spammers or (2) new accounts that are showing signs of being repeat abusers. This seems to be roughly the correct tradeoff.

I don't have a problem with it, but it's obviously (for the person you're replying to) the secrecy.

> EDIT: unfortunately I cannot defend my point in the comments, as I am now rate limited :)

All comments get rate limited as they start to nest, by hiding the reply link. Are you seeing that?

Thank you; that makes sense. I can see that viewpoint, but I'm torn on whether I agree with it.

On the one hand, it's at the very least considered good UX to inform users of information regarding their account status that impacts their experience.

On the other hand, it's probably acceptable for a place called "Hacker News" to hide some community features behind "You have to demonstrate some willingness to do some computer sleuthing to learn this detail."

There's also an (account-specific) "You're posting too quickly. Please Slow Down. Thanks" that specific users get if they have a flag set on their account.

Responding to an offending user’s comment on a site with no notifications barely qualifies as telling them. If you truly wanted to inform them, you would either put a banner next to their name in the header or simply prevent them from being able to post. You and I both know what the intention is here, just like the rate limit you have placed on my account.

It's telling them in the same way that anybody tells anybody anything here.

Obviously the intention is to inform—otherwise why bother? Those comments take a lot of time to write.

This post has been deleted and the user has left.

As someone who personally has been rate-limited, it's a little annoying but justified in basically every occasion I've seen someone complain about it. It's also not hard to figure out what's happening if you're the kind of person willing to put in enough effort to be a good member of the hacker community.

Avoid getting into flame wars, and send an email to dang saying you'll do so in the future, and you're fine. If you can't do that, or can't be bothered to use Google to figure that out, there's a good reason for your account to be rate limited.

I can confirm for you that you're not shadowbanned. Flagging comes from users, not moderators. It simply means that multiple members of the community in good standing indicated that your comments are not a good fit for HN.

I suspect your "other comment" got flagged for being political polemic from a new account, which fits the pattern of, as dang phrased it, "repeat abusers".

> Our being able to post here at all is a privilege afforded to us, and their choosing to revoke that privilege for any reason is fully within their rights.

I really hate it when discourse about anything devolves into rights.

If I have a genius or terrible take like "Chairs are pointless. Nobody should use chairs because ..." you can't just say "Well actually The Constitution allows people to use chairs and you can't ban the private use of chairs." That doesn't bring anything to the discussion.

Nobody is saying here that HN isn't legally allowed to control the content on its website, but different people have different opinions about what's right and wrong for websites to do which doesn't involve having to bring the government in to settle things.

That was done to me as well. I still have no idea why and when I finally got it lifted dang didn't know why either. One of the most infuriating experiences I've had in a forum, and actively made worse by the sycophantic adoring articles going around at the time citing their "personal human touch". dang explained that they can't possibly have time to give everyone that personal human touch! But not to the reporters, apparently.

Have you considered asking for a refund?

> And ultimately, "freedom of speech" refers to the government silencing speech, not private companies/private websites. We are all guests here, and if someone isn't upholding the standards the people who run this website want people to uphold, then they're free to do whatever they want.

If you hold this opinion then you can never say water, food, shelter, internet, etc. are human rights either.

HN is free. If you paid for it, you have been scammed

He knows that. I suspect he is implying that I have nothing to complain about because it is a free service, which is a pretty vacuous argument.

It's a response to your expectation of personalized service.

"Freedom of speech" does not simply refer to the 1st amendment - the concept has existed much longer than the USA has. I don't think GP is arguing that shadowbanned users have a "right" to use HN, instead they're saying that it is somewhat unethical because it is a form of lying.

As for shadowbanning being a key tool in managing a community - In HN's case, I imagine any shadowbanning system could be easily defeated, as a malicious actor could create a new account for every comment.

Same experience here. I was rate limited a few times, and when I got around to emailing dang, I don’t recall him figuring out why for any of the cases. Kind of annoying but obviously not the end of the world. Not remotely worth complaining about. Would more transparency be nice? Sure but I doubt it scales.

You can always abuse the “Edit” function for a somewhat limited way to reply and have a conversation, but it’s simpler to just drop an email note.

I think you need to take a basic class in ethics if you think ethics are determined entirely by rights and law

How is it not? I think it’s wrong, ie immoral

Honesty

A stranger providing you a service for free doesn't have an ethical obligation to answer your emails.

So it's just for specific users that are manually targeted by dang? With zero transparency and accountability I'd say it's pretty awful.

Personally I think they do

Many or most so-called "free" services, e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc., are a front for another money-making scheme. If you're not the customer, you're the product.

Hacker News is an advertisement for Y Combinator.

Let's not pretend that this is a charity.

It's also worth noting that the operators of such "free" services don't publicly take the haughty attitude of "if you don't like the service, you can have a refund of $0". You'll never hear that rhetoric from dang. They want people to use their services. Only unaffiliated outside defenders use that rhetoric.

The operator of the service hasn't taken that haughty attitude. A fellow user of the service has. They're feeling haughtier by the minute, it seems.

> They're feeling haughtier by the minute, it seems.

Who are you referring to? I'm not the one who requested a response from the moderators.

One problem is that many so-called flame wars are differences over one or more points of contention - resolving these is often a subjective matter, so for dang to perform that task fairly (disciplining one individual among two/many), it would require him to be an unbiased, perfectly rational human being.

I am not demanding this of him of course, but this sort of level of finer details seem to not get discussed in the many threads like this that I've read.

It's for specific users that the moderator of the site has decided could stand to have their bandwidth throttled to improve the site for everyone. I don't see anything awful about it; the accountability is whether we keep showing up to use the site. Regarding transparency, dang generally comments on a thread when they need a community member to review the rules and obey them, and the rules are public.

I'd be interested to learn more about the moral framework that arrives at such a conclusion.

Broadly speaking, the hacker ethos has relied on a "share and enjoy" metric, a direct reference to a bit from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. People sometimes forget that the bit goes on to offer specific suggestions for those who are receiving something for free and have complaints regarding the flavor directed at the provider.

It's worth noting in general that on the topic of moderating a public forum, one of the constraints is the bandwidth of the moderators. I remember when EA ran into trouble because they attempted to build an AI model to auto moderate conversations in game chat. Their model failed when they trird to take the model built in one game and apply it to another game where the context involved a lot more discussion of Nazis. But the reasoning was sound: the inputs they used to train the model were the probability that a given sequence of conversation would result in the need to use human moderation intervention. They wanted to do less of that, so they trained a model to see it coming.

Similarly, the bandwidth limiting on Hacker News diminishes moderation workload, because nobody has to moderate a comment never posted. And I don't doubt the site has enough signal to make an educated guess that posts going rapidly in a short burst of time is a good low resolution flamewar signal.

Too many words to say the post limiter throttle is one of the things that keeps the site free to use.

Different frameworks of ethics disagree on whether lying is always unethical. Shadowbanning-as-lying can be seen as feeding misinformation to a hostile actor in an attempt to impede them. In that sense, it's no more unethical than someone demanding the combination to a safe so they can rob it and a person responding with a false combination.

> As for shadowbanning being a key tool in managing a community - In HN's case, I imagine any shadowbanning system could be easily defeated, as a malicious actor could create a new account for every comment.

New accounts have no history and no score, so they fit into the community in a (justifiably) low-reputation place. While you can do that, you'll have an army of "greentext" accounts and the community tends to downsample their opinions.

In this context, I think it's an appeal to the ethics of property rights over some other framework. It's an answer to the (undefended in the post) statement "[Rate limiting] is certainly immoral" by offering a framework in which it is not: "People run servers, and they host users on those servers. What is 'moral' on those servers is the will of the operator, and we are all guests. Morality extends to us the opportunity to freely leave at any time; it need not extend us more than that."

One can argue this framework is bad, but it is a framework under which one can consider the question of whether rate-limiting is immoral.

(I'd even go further to argue that "my property my rules unless the government has declared otherwise" is a default ethical framework for, at least, most Americans. Be it Disney World or my own hearth, there are a set of rules, written and unwritten, that those who do not co-own the property must abide while inhabiting the property or operating the property, and the owner may revoke the privilege of inhabitance or operation at, broadly, their discretion. Maybe "ownership makes right" isn't good enough for the specific context of "a user of a freely-provided authenticated public forum", but I think the burden is on the person holding that opinion to explain why we need a rule more restrictive than the default property-ownership-based 'my forum my rules').

Nope, I got throttled and never learned why. It's dang's empire here.

If I were to hazard a guess, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35921579

If it bothers you that you can't figure out precisely why you were throttled, an email to the admins expressing a desire for UI around that might not be unwelcome.

I think that even if you offer a service for free you are obliged to offer a level of quality and support, much like how you can’t just sell poisonous ice cream. I don’t believe in “share and enjoy” and I don’t think that “warranty free” is morally good

It actually has, that sense of obligation is me, since I am the universe

> you can't sell poisonous ice cream

There's licensing around selling food. I wouldn't be against "license to practice software development," but I'd note that (a) that's a very different world than the one we live in and (b) I don't know that most of the open source software we enjoy, hack on, and bemoan would exist in a universe where licensing standards made every software engineer who had authored it beholden to a minimum standard of quality before distributing it.

Would apache have survived in a world where software engineers, or their software, had to be quality-certified? Would MySQL? Would Linux?

Other independent observers may disagree on your self-assessment.

If they think that I’m not the universe, they’re wrong

Again, law is not morality.

> Would apache have survived in a world where software engineers, or their software, had to be quality-certified? Would MySQL? Would Linux?

Yes

We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments and/or get involved in flamewars. Your account has done that a lot and we've had to warn you for a long time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35921579 (May 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769278 (Sept 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30390204 (Feb 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26185464 (Feb 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342064 (July 2019)

We're happy to take the rate limit off once we have reason to believe that an account is using HN in the intended spirit and will keep doing so. Unfortunately your account is still breaking the site guidelines badly. You posted several instances of nationalistic flamebait just today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273338

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273246

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273223

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273200

and religious flamebait the day before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37259499.

You've also frequently been crossing into personal attack and name-calling:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37024609

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37024609

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015883

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015841

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015814

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015805

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015781

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37005281

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36999963

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36943596

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36789253

In fact your account breaks the guidelines so frequently that it's past the line at which we'd ban an account, not just rate-limit it. I'm not going to ban you right now because it wouldn't feel fair to do that in response to a question about being rate-limited. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.

If you build up a track record of using HN in the intended spirit for a while, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to take a look and hopefully remove the rate limit.

My expectation is that he describes his level of personalized service the same way in private emails as in public comments. If you find that expectation overly haughty, well, you know where the refund button is.