[Questioneer]

If form is the best critique you can muster, please don't even comment. If you wish to read a longer more heart-felt comment of mine regarding egregious copyright violations, here[1]. It is a topic that pains me to this day, take a moment to read if you will.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6262162

Edit: Read before down-voting.

[swombat]

This is not a critique, just an observation:

You're well on track to get hellbanned again. Do you learn from your own mistakes?

[Questioneer]

To make a different but related reply, see the comment in which I responded to a submission from another? I attempted to direct the discussion to the hacker/technical aspects of the "Syrian Electronic Army." Their prolific hacking of large entities is rather noteworthy. I noted how a 'western' company named Bluecoat had their hardware installed by Assad, the logs were later leaked showing tracking of sexual and religious activity.

I tried by best to steer the conversation into a realm that truly does relate to "Hacker News." The real life ramifications of producing spyware, ISP data mirroring hardware. Of course the topic was deaded and my commments down-voted.

Is HN a place for commentary on Snowden and Manning sexual habits or for the details and real ramifications for our work?

I've been hell-banned and down-voted for trying to steer discussion into more than social observations of the actors involved. It lowers faith in this community and those involved moderating it.

[Questioneer]

One article I submitted was overridden by an elder member when he submitted it. Long after the thread gained positive discussion. Pointing out this flaw, received me one of my first hell-bans.

What I am to learn from this? Do not submit things older members may later submit? Do not point out the flaws in such a system?

edit: Thanks swombat for ending with a question, a way to further discussion instead of making it a pointed statement. :)

[gus_massa]

It's the wrong conclusion. For example, yesterday there were two submissions of "Linux 3.9 introduced a new way of writing socket servers"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6269332 (222 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6270330 (dead, 3 points, 5 hours later)

The second one was submitted by a user with more karma, average, and days in HN.

Sometimes a story is submitted by two persons and the dupe detector fails. One of them get traction, the selection is by random events, like the hour of the submission, how many upvotes it get's in the first hours, which other stories are in the first page, ... I have seen some good stories that get only 2 or 3 points, and after a month someone else submits a similar story from another source and it gets 50 points. It's also a matter of luck.

[Questioneer]

Was the second article posted with the '/2' at the end of the link? Things like that seem to cause most filter hiccups, I tried to discount those obviously.

For science and all that, can you think of other examples?

edit: Oh I see it is different chapters, /1 /2 etc. Nevermind that.

[stephengillie]

One article I submitted was overridden by an elder member when he submitted it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "elder member" -- do you mean someone with more karma? Someone whose account was created before the account of yours to which you're referring? An individual whose age is greater than yours? An account that makes daily posts and receives regular upvotes?

Also I'm confused about why you're spending so much effort to make yourself noticed -- it's weekend late night/early morning for most of HN's readership, which means your effort has significantly less effect than it would about 50-60 hours from now...

[Questioneer]

Well some people submit articles with '?' at the end or other such nonsense to post the same article others have. But in many instances submissions from 'green' accounts that have gained traction suddenly poofed in favor of the same article from a more established (account age) user.

I was not exactly concerned by it until it the same occurred to me. When the issue was raised, I received a wave of down-votes. To boot further submissions were hell-banned!

Flabbergasted, my tone and demeanor on this site has changed since. Cheers for the conversation instead of silent down-votes or condescending commentary, stephengillie.