Hacker News Guidelines

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.

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 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.