[Archipelagia]

So this might be naive, but... what interest would someone have in taking down HN?

Like, people with skills to run an attack are also more likely to actually enjoy participating here. It'd be like someone trying to take down Stack Overflow. Even if you can do that – especially if you're the kind of person who could do that – you'd probably be shooting yourself in the foot, right?

[codesections]

Yeah, I thought of that. But (especially given political polarization) I would expect that there'd be at least someone with an axe to grind and the necessary technical skills. I mean, there's certainly no shortage of criticism of Hacker News/some HN moderation actions even on HN (or "the orange site" as it's known in some circles).

[1attice]

I would imagine that this (admittedly plausible-sounding) scenario is offset by the fact that, given the audience, a politically-motivated DDOS would have the opposite of the desired impact. No one here would cheer the loss of HN, even its critics (like me.) We want it to do better.

It's simply too valuable for either side to destroy.

Generalizing, it's not a belief in unfettered free speech that saves us but rather a belief in carefully curated conversation. The archangel Dang keeps the discussion so valuable that there is no margin in damaging it.

If the tenor of the conversation declined to the point where it was a Twitter-grade dumpster fire, then yes, someone would eventually DDOS it.

[yazzku]

I have the axe but not the skills :)

[gardenhedge]

There's a lot of disdain for HN on Twitter for some reason

[Archipelagia]

To be fair, there's a lot of disdain for pretty much everything on Twitter

[hackerman123469]

There's a lot of disdain for Twitter on Twitter.

[krapp]

It's one of the few places we can vent about HN without being reprimanded, rate limited and eventually banned.

[gardenhedge]

does HN rate limit people?

[krapp]

Yes. You'll get a message saying that "you're posting too fast." That's because you've been limited to only a few (four or five) posts per hour. You'll never be told when this is applied to your account, or what the limit is, or when it's lifted, if it is. They also used to purposely slow response times as a way to drive certain posters away but I think they've stopped that. They also shadowban, but at least that's reversible. Unless you vouch for the wrong people, then you lose your vouching privileges.

Basically, the mods will tweak anything and everything they can to either increase the quality of your comments or decrease the damage they do, with banning outright as a last resort.