[dang]

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.

[vox_mollis]

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.

Again, thanks for the clarification.