[stephen_g]

The problem is that mesothelioma (the worst case) is a particularly nasty cancer, and the more common things it causes, like lung cancer and asbestosis aren't fun either. We still get people contracting these diseases decades after doing home renovations here in Australia because it was in so many building materials for decades here. They just didn't know about the danger (despite massive publicity campaigns).

And for what? In 99% of the uses of asbestos domestically and commercially there are safe products that can do just as good a job, perhaps just requiring things to be slightly thicker to get the same insulating value... Sure there are some niche industrial and scientific applications where it's still potentially the best performing option but so much of what it was used for, it just didn't need to be...

[_c5eq]

I originally replied to you with a long comment, but I saw that I angered the mob.

I think I'm done with this site.

[ltbarcly3]

I think the era when you could have nonvonforming views on this site is long over. People now use voting as an opinion aggrement token.

[Retric]

People have always done that, but down votes don’t actually matter so why worry about it?

I make plenty of comments knowing people will downvote them based on content and still ended up so much positive karma it would take serious effort to burn it all.

[ltbarcly3]

I think the overall vibe is quite different from what it was in 2010 say? It used to be 'post erlang' when there was too much off topic posting, but these days discussions seem to be highly dominated by people who are 'tech adjacent' and have no idea how to code or build products, and no experience outside of big, crappy, late-stage 'tech' companies.

[Manu40]

downvotes cause you to be essentially a lite-shadow ban if they happen enough, especially if in a flagged thread/comment. You get rate limited, which means only 5 comments per day allowed. Max.

So, sorry, but while I didn't downvote you, I do disagree with you; entirely. Validly.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...

______________

> TL;DR: apparently this can happen due to an account being "rate-limited". Rate-limited accounts can post a max of five posts within 24 hours.

See : https://hn.nuxtjs.org/item/15507821

Specifically this bit:

dang 1018 days ago

That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site.

The thread also has interesting discussions on other mod tools: shadowbanning, IP bans, and the like.

Apparently the way to un-rate-limit an account is to send in an email and mention that you will "stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Some amount of convincing prostration may be required, as a sort of high-level turing test. There does not seem to be a way to do this while not giving away your email address (which was not required at signup).

The moderator mentioned something about repeated, human-written warnings before rate-limiting, but this does not seem to be the case now (2020) - rate limiting seems to be a milder, less-known variant of the shadowban.

________________

[Retric]

That’s not a function of receiving downvotes alone.

Downvoting, flagging, and moderator actions are three different things.

Posting something people disagree with isn’t the same as a flame war. Keeping things civil is a requirement, which trips people up.

[Manu40]

Look. All I know is what I looked up, and have read in the past; and that I wasn't rate limited until after I commented on a thread that suddenly got mega-flagged and I deleted my comment to try to be safe. Wasn't fast enough I guess, cause either an auto-bot just rate limited everyone in it; or a mod did.

Prior to that, I wasn't rate limited. After that, I was. Make of it what you will.

[Manu40]

Which is why I'm probably going to ditch this site as far as commenting goes.

I'll still use it to see what people think, but that's about all its good for in the comments section now; just like Reddit, Twitter, and others.

But at least the links are still interesting.

P.S. I'm mostly only commenting still right now because

A: I haven't made my decision yet and

B: It would be rude to ignore those who did reply to me kindly.