| 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. ________________ |
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.