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"

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?

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.

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.