[shadowgovt]

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.

[bitcharmer]

Nope, I got throttled and never learned why. It's dang's empire here.

[shadowgovt]

If I were to hazard a guess, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35921579

If it bothers you that you can't figure out precisely why you were throttled, an email to the admins expressing a desire for UI around that might not be unwelcome.

[dang]

We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments and/or get involved in flamewars. Your account has done that a lot and we've had to warn you for a long time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35921579 (May 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769278 (Sept 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30390204 (Feb 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26185464 (Feb 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342064 (July 2019)

We're happy to take the rate limit off once we have reason to believe that an account is using HN in the intended spirit and will keep doing so. Unfortunately your account is still breaking the site guidelines badly. You posted several instances of nationalistic flamebait just today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273338

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273246

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273223

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273200

and religious flamebait the day before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37259499.

You've also frequently been crossing into personal attack and name-calling:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37024609

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37024609

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015883

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015841

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015814

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015805

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015781

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37005281

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36999963

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36943596

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36789253

In fact your account breaks the guidelines so frequently that it's past the line at which we'd ban an account, not just rate-limit it. I'm not going to ban you right now because it wouldn't feel fair to do that in response to a question about being rate-limited. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.

If you build up a track record of using HN in the intended spirit for a while, you'd be welcome to email [e-mail] and we'll be happy to take a look and hopefully remove the rate limit.