I’ve had a few run-ins with dang. Every post I write nowadays I have to reread carefully to soften any sharp edges and avoid getting into trouble, but I don’t always have time to double check a comment if I’m in a hurry. I wonder if there is a hidden reputation score or if it’s all just based off of dang’s memory. Public karma scores are mostly useless except as a vanity metric.
I don't think it's immoral - it's their site, after all. Our being able to post here at all is a privilege afforded to us, and their choosing to revoke that privilege for any reason is fully within their rights. No cause or explanation is even required, though they are frequently provided out of the abundant courtesy that the moderators seem to have a natural talent for. If you think about it, even rate limiting is a slightly more courteous alternative to outright banning someone.
I think shadowbanning is a bit unethical as it technically involves lying, but afaik HN doesn't do such things.
While shadowbanning has been made political, it is a key tool in managing a community. If you ban a troublemaker, they just make a new account. So if you can isolate a troublemaker without them understanding what's happening, you improve the community and reduce the whack-a-mole game.
And ultimately, "freedom of speech" refers to the government silencing speech, not private companies/private websites. We are all guests here, and if someone isn't upholding the standards the people who run this website want people to uphold, then they're free to do whatever they want.
"Freedom of speech" does not simply refer to the 1st amendment - the concept has existed much longer than the USA has. I don't think GP is arguing that shadowbanned users have a "right" to use HN, instead they're saying that it is somewhat unethical because it is a form of lying.
As for shadowbanning being a key tool in managing a community - In HN's case, I imagine any shadowbanning system could be easily defeated, as a malicious actor could create a new account for every comment.
Different frameworks of ethics disagree on whether lying is always unethical. Shadowbanning-as-lying can be seen as feeding misinformation to a hostile actor in an attempt to impede them. In that sense, it's no more unethical than someone demanding the combination to a safe so they can rob it and a person responding with a false combination.
> As for shadowbanning being a key tool in managing a community - In HN's case, I imagine any shadowbanning system could be easily defeated, as a malicious actor could create a new account for every comment.
New accounts have no history and no score, so they fit into the community in a (justifiably) low-reputation place. While you can do that, you'll have an army of "greentext" accounts and the community tends to downsample their opinions.
> And ultimately, "freedom of speech" refers to the government silencing speech, not private companies/private websites. We are all guests here, and if someone isn't upholding the standards the people who run this website want people to uphold, then they're free to do whatever they want.
If you hold this opinion then you can never say water, food, shelter, internet, etc. are human rights either.
> Our being able to post here at all is a privilege afforded to us, and their choosing to revoke that privilege for any reason is fully within their rights.
I really hate it when discourse about anything devolves into rights.
If I have a genius or terrible take like "Chairs are pointless. Nobody should use chairs because ..." you can't just say "Well actually The Constitution allows people to use chairs and you can't ban the private use of chairs." That doesn't bring anything to the discussion.
Nobody is saying here that HN isn't legally allowed to control the content on its website, but different people have different opinions about what's right and wrong for websites to do which doesn't involve having to bring the government in to settle things.
In this context, I think it's an appeal to the ethics of property rights over some other framework. It's an answer to the (undefended in the post) statement "[Rate limiting] is certainly immoral" by offering a framework in which it is not: "People run servers, and they host users on those servers. What is 'moral' on those servers is the will of the operator, and we are all guests. Morality extends to us the opportunity to freely leave at any time; it need not extend us more than that."
One can argue this framework is bad, but it is a framework under which one can consider the question of whether rate-limiting is immoral.
(I'd even go further to argue that "my property my rules unless the government has declared otherwise" is a default ethical framework for, at least, most Americans. Be it Disney World or my own hearth, there are a set of rules, written and unwritten, that those who do not co-own the property must abide while inhabiting the property or operating the property, and the owner may revoke the privilege of inhabitance or operation at, broadly, their discretion. Maybe "ownership makes right" isn't good enough for the specific context of "a user of a freely-provided authenticated public forum", but I think the burden is on the person holding that opinion to explain why we need a rule more restrictive than the default property-ownership-based 'my forum my rules').
Shadowbanning is something we only do for either (1) spammers or (2) new accounts that are showing signs of being repeat abusers. This seems to be roughly the correct tradeoff.
Responding to an offending user’s comment on a site with no notifications barely qualifies as telling them. If you truly wanted to inform them, you would either put a banner next to their name in the header or simply prevent them from being able to post. You and I both know what the intention is here, just like the rate limit you have placed on my account.
I can confirm for you that you're not shadowbanned. Flagging comes from users, not moderators. It simply means that multiple members of the community in good standing indicated that your comments are not a good fit for HN.
I suspect your "other comment" got flagged for being political polemic from a new account, which fits the pattern of, as dang phrased it, "repeat abusers".
When I was rate-limited, I found it quite easy to find out what happened after a little bit of googling and get it reversed with a nicely worded email. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why you can't really post after a reply from dang.
Nonetheless, I agree they could be a bit more explicit about this.
Unfortunately, that reply can sometimes be days, weeks or who knows how old, and HN doesn't inform you of replies to your comments, so unless you happen to see it when it happens you're stuck with having to intuit that "you're replying too fast" is an extremely passive aggressive flag on your account and not just a general site-wide rate limiter. Or notice that your flags no longer work, or your vouches no longer work, or any number of even more subtle effects.
>Or notice that your flags no longer work, or your vouches no longer work, or any number of even more subtle effects.
Wait, I'm now wondering if I've been limited. I've never once seen the "Vouch" button and I've flagged some blatant stuff that nothing happened to, but figured there was somewhat of a vote (or multiple flags) before it took any effect. Can anyone confirm this behavior?
You said it doesn't take a genius to work it out but you haven't worked it out. It's opaque other than that we know it's a flag that can be manually set on the user without their knowledge
I worked out that I had been flagged. I was not saying that dang replying was the mechanism, you are just (intentionally?) misinterpreting what I am saying. That dang replies to you is an indicator that he has flagged you.
Not going to keep replying, as I suspect that a conversation between two people flagged in this manner is one of the likeliest to turn flame-y :)
There's also an (account-specific) "You're posting too quickly. Please Slow Down. Thanks" that specific users get if they have a flag set on their account.
It's for specific users that the moderator of the site has decided could stand to have their bandwidth throttled to improve the site for everyone. I don't see anything awful about it; the accountability is whether we keep showing up to use the site. Regarding transparency, dang generally comments on a thread when they need a community member to review the rules and obey them, and the rules are public.
As someone who personally has been rate-limited, it's a little annoying but justified in basically every occasion I've seen someone complain about it. It's also not hard to figure out what's happening if you're the kind of person willing to put in enough effort to be a good member of the hacker community.
Avoid getting into flame wars, and send an email to dang saying you'll do so in the future, and you're fine. If you can't do that, or can't be bothered to use Google to figure that out, there's a good reason for your account to be rate limited.
One problem is that many so-called flame wars are differences over one or more points of contention - resolving these is often a subjective matter, so for dang to perform that task fairly (disciplining one individual among two/many), it would require him to be an unbiased, perfectly rational human being.
I am not demanding this of him of course, but this sort of level of finer details seem to not get discussed in the many threads like this that I've read.
It's worth noting in general that on the topic of moderating a public forum, one of the constraints is the bandwidth of the moderators. I remember when EA ran into trouble because they attempted to build an AI model to auto moderate conversations in game chat. Their model failed when they trird to take the model built in one game and apply it to another game where the context involved a lot more discussion of Nazis. But the reasoning was sound: the inputs they used to train the model were the probability that a given sequence of conversation would result in the need to use human moderation intervention. They wanted to do less of that, so they trained a model to see it coming.
Similarly, the bandwidth limiting on Hacker News diminishes moderation workload, because nobody has to moderate a comment never posted. And I don't doubt the site has enough signal to make an educated guess that posts going rapidly in a short burst of time is a good low resolution flamewar signal.
Too many words to say the post limiter throttle is one of the things that keeps the site free to use.
Thank you; that makes sense. I can see that viewpoint, but I'm torn on whether I agree with it.
On the one hand, it's at the very least considered good UX to inform users of information regarding their account status that impacts their experience.
On the other hand, it's probably acceptable for a place called "Hacker News" to hide some community features behind "You have to demonstrate some willingness to do some computer sleuthing to learn this detail."
That was done to me as well. I still have no idea why and when I finally got it lifted dang didn't know why either. One of the most infuriating experiences I've had in a forum, and actively made worse by the sycophantic adoring articles going around at the time citing their "personal human touch". dang explained that they can't possibly have time to give everyone that personal human touch! But not to the reporters, apparently.
Same experience here. I was rate limited a few times, and when I got around to emailing dang, I don’t recall him figuring out why for any of the cases. Kind of annoying but obviously not the end of the world. Not remotely worth complaining about. Would more transparency be nice? Sure but I doubt it scales.
You can always abuse the “Edit” function for a somewhat limited way to reply and have a conversation, but it’s simpler to just drop an email note.
Thank you SO much for what you do.
We should all get together and throw him a virtual party...