Note that there is a censorship angle worth thinking about as well.

None of us see the scores. That means the mods can and do rearrange the comments however they want.

My comments, for example, have been rearranged to start and stay at the bottom regardless of upvotes since December of last year.

I've emailed multiple times about this and was told "Stop talking about it and write 20 good comments."

There were arguably good reasons for imposing the penalty at the time, on a temporary basis. But it's not a temporary basis. It's a jail term without limit and without a clear end. And I'm just not allowed to talk about it.

The only reason this isn't obvious to everyone is because the scores are hidden.

Note that on my other account, I once had a toplevel comment with 58 upvotes that was subsequently pinned to the very bottom of the thread, manually. The community thought it was highly relevant. It wasn't bandwagoning or flamebait. And I try to write well.

I don't know what to do about this. I thought about trying to start my own site, but HN has too much inertia. I could just start a new account. But dammit, I'm sillysaurus, and it's who I am. I don't want to run. I want to be a part of the community with everyone else.

I'm no angel, and I've made mistakes. But I'm sorry for them and I have been willing to cooperate and change. The mods simply refuse to remove three different penalties: I'm not allowed to vote for anything; I'm not allowed to post more than five times every three hours; I'm not allowed to fairly be evaluated with sibling comments (all my comments wear cement shoes and sink straight to the bottom).

And no one knows, because comment scores are hidden.

I think the mods do very well, by the way. We're all lucky to have these particular people in charge. But what else can I do other than try to talk about this? I've sent >40 emails on the topic, so it's clearly not going to resolve itself in other ways. And I'm tired of being excluded.

The frustrating thing is, I've seen this kind of treatment enacted on others (yummyfajitas...) and the end result is usually the same: They get fed up with the site and leave. And who could blame them? It's very frustrating.

But that's really the goal: To frustrate you and get you to want to leave, or at least to stop interacting with the site. After all, you were penalized for a reason, right? The solution is to get you to go away. And banning you would just piss you off and cause accusations of censorship.

The front page ranking is already mostly fiction. Stories stay and fall based on human intervention. A human classifies almost every story into a bucket, and that bucket determines how the falloff curve proceeds. It makes sense that comments are similarly classified.

But that's manual curation. It's not community driven. So if your content doesn't really fit with those doing the curating, you're given the boot.

I'm not really upset about it. It's just a surprising twist of fate, and something I've thought about for a long time. Maybe this comment will serve as a warning to others, at least: be careful what you write.

Of course, that's rather dramatic. Who cares?

Well, I care, because I love this community since I was a teenager. And it's weird to see it evolve. But I'm not a teen anymore and it's not a small site anymore, so I understand that's just how things go.