kenrikm, you have been hellbanned -- your posts are not visible but you're not informed of this. I hope you see this. I'm seriously considering leaving the HN community because of the frequency with which I see good contributors hellbanned.
I'm ready to jump ship too. It's gotten ridiculous. I wonder if they keep track of which mods are hellbanning people. Is it just a few bad apples or is it systemic? I've seen so many thoughtful, but invisible posts lately that it makes me feel sort of sick.
It's not necessarily a person - I think PG has a machine-learning algorithm that's trained on the decisions of actual human mods, and then uses various features of the comment history to determine whether to hell-ban.
I don't actually mind censoring, but censoring someone without them knowing, and allowing them to contribute while thinking that their contributions are actually benefitting someone, is insane. In fact, just typing that out made me realize that I have to leave until they fix this issue.
That's how most large sites handle abuse & anti-spam protection. One of the cardinal rules of spam-defense is that you don't let spammers know that you've caught them, you just silently quarantine their spam. Otherwise, they'll adopt countermeasures and you're stuck in a rat race.
I think PG's testing the hypothesis of "What if we don't have to be 100% sure? What if we probabilistically ban people based on comments that are likely to have no value? Will that result in a higher or lower community quality?"
Presumably the assumption is that some good people will be banned and leave, and some other good people will just leave out of sympathy, but it's better to have good people leave than have bad people enter the community. It's an interesting hypothesis, and HN has been going strong for 5+ years now with minimal moderation effort, though I have to admit that it seems to violate basic rules of fairness and empathy. Then again, a lot of businesses are built on being unfair to people.
I believe age discrimination is being split into two chunks:
1) Some people with a mistaken belief that correlation does imply causation think that just because some programmers have let their skillsets atrophy implies that one should stay away from older programmers.
2) Older people by virtue of experience, skillsets are pricing themselves out of the job market. I have an older friend who is a phenomenal hacker but doesn't like going into management. He found himself either being offered VP of Engg type roles which required way more management than he was willing to do or being given Engineering roles with way less money than he was prepared to accept. Also, once you get a family, the amount of leeway you have in accepting a tiny fraction of what you are worth in exchange for money and stocks becomes quite limited.
Yes, absolutely. I remember back when Java was only a few years old, it was common to see jobs where the company wanted 5-6 years of experience. Now, it could have been agency recruiters who had no idea what they were talking about, or it could have been coming from HR. But the result is the same: flagged for spam.