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by dang 604 days ago
Yes, we've rate limited your account because it posts comments that obviously break the site guidelines, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41880814.

Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended instead? I don't want to ban you but it's not cool when people keep posting like that.

Btw, if you (or anyone) don't want to be rate limited on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
1 comments
beeboobaa3 602 days ago
It would be a good first step for you stop being sneaky about this. Very hard to respect you as a moderator when you employ underhanded tactics like sneakily rate limiting accounts and trying to gaslight people into thinking this is an universal limit. I suppose it's a (small) step up from the shadowbanning you used to.

Perhaps change the message to something like: "Your account has been rate limited. For more information email [...]"

And honestly, having people beg via email is just gross power tripping behavior.

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dang 602 days ago
It's just an attempt to manage overwhelming case load with limited resources. It's on my list to build a system that gives better feedback.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that it won't just make things worse, since not everyone is going to respond as well as you might to a message like "Your account has been rate limited."

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dredmorbius 602 days ago
Amplifying on dang's comment: from my own experience moderating, many people respond in a strongly negative fashion to moderation, up to and including prolonged attacks on the site itself and threats to moderators. Effective moderation on large sites is a careful balance between transparency and pragmatism, to the extent that even well-intentioned initiatives such as the Santa Clara Principles (<https://santaclaraprinciples.org/>) may not be practical.

Something I note having been caught up on both sides of this issue: as moderator and moderated.

HN itself is not one of the super-sites, but it is amongst the better discussion platforms on the internet here and now (boys), and has been for far longer than virtually any other instance I can think of (dating to 2007). Metafilter would be the principle other exemplar.

Usenet, Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Google+, Reddit, Ello, Diaspora*, Imzy, FB, Birdsite, and others, would be amongst the failures IMO. Not all are now defunct (though about half that list are), none remain usable.

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