Hacker News Guidelines

While you are there, go through dang’s comments timeline https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

Moderating something like HN is a very hard job. Gratitude .

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"

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.

>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).

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.