What's never discussed is HN's "voting hellban". That is, you are permitted to upvote/downvote, but your votes don't ever actually count. This is the case with my account, but it's never discussed or documented anywhere.
HN has various software and moderation penalties that can be applied to accounts that routinely break the site guidelines. That is the case with your account.
Some of these penalties involve voting, some involve ranking, others involve all kinds of different things. Taken together, they're one of the most important devices HN has to stave off a summary collapse into a disastrously worse place. There's no "voting hellban" (including on your account, some of whose votes count), but there are provisions for dropping votes and weighting them according to various criteria, which we're not going to disclose.
People sometimes think that HN maintains the quality it has (not great, but could be worse) purely by its own equilibrium. That's far from true. It takes major, conscious effort, and much of that effort—as much as possible—we encode into software. Without that it would be physically impossible to keep this place up, and would drive anyone mad to try.
Thank you. I understand why you wouldn't disclose the specific algorithms used, but perhaps issue a set of guidelines for not falling afoul of them?
For instance, I always access HN via a public VPN service, and I suspect coming from a shared IP may have an impact (I'm guessing, anyway). If this is a criteria, it would be nice to know.
Or a throttling delay versus other posters. I caught someone's eye on HN, and now I'm limited in how many comments I can post in a sliding window compared to other users.
That's neither true nor fair. We sometimes fall behind on emails, and I had several dozen to answer before getting to yours, which is currently next in the queue.
Coming here to see the context before answering your email is an ironic moment to encounter snark about us not answering emails. If you'd merely said we were too slow, I'd fully agree.
Apologies, I wasn't aware of the backlog. It wasn't intentionally snarky - if I ran a board as popular as this, prioritizing popular accounts would be sensible thing for me to do, so I assumed.
Verified it with both a throwaway and a friend. Also, my 0 minute posts always end up near the bottom of the page, as if I had on the order of 10 karma.
Right, but I mean what did you look at to "verify" it? The upvote count of the post? Why did you need a friend to verify it? If you are logged in vs. out, is the upvote count different?
That is a highly nasty and unethical thing to do to an unsuspecting user who spends time carefully moderating the discussion and trying to help the site.
On the other hand, it's a great way to handle someone who assists spammers or astroturfers.
Some of these penalties involve voting, some involve ranking, others involve all kinds of different things. Taken together, they're one of the most important devices HN has to stave off a summary collapse into a disastrously worse place. There's no "voting hellban" (including on your account, some of whose votes count), but there are provisions for dropping votes and weighting them according to various criteria, which we're not going to disclose.
People sometimes think that HN maintains the quality it has (not great, but could be worse) purely by its own equilibrium. That's far from true. It takes major, conscious effort, and much of that effort—as much as possible—we encode into software. Without that it would be physically impossible to keep this place up, and would drive anyone mad to try.