PG hides users and delays page loads for them
For a while now I've noticed I haven't received a single reply to my posts or a single vote. I was a little suspicious at first and gave PG/HN the benefit of the doubt, and I figured it may just have been a result of removing scores from view. But tonight I decided to test my hypothesis and what do you know... my last 14 comments/submissions are dead and it would be safe to assume my comments are killed immediately after submitting them because I tested this too.
Tracking back to the first dead comment... it turns out it was a comment where I defended PHP as a language where it was being bashed - quite frankly I've grown tired of the hate. And my comment received a reply bashing it some more and I kindly defended it further. Is it a coincidence that all of my comments (the ones defending PHP as well) have been killed since then? Somehow I doubt it.

Also interesting - I'm not sure if this is normal or not - but all of my posts do not appear dead when I'm logged in with my usual username.

Lastly, since then... I've noticed HN has been painfully slow. It takes upwards of 5 seconds to load any page on the HN site... yet everything is loading instantly through the proxy I'm using right now (and it's definitely not cached)... which tells me that my username/IP address is probably on some kind of list comprised of people who PG/HN wants to get rid of.

I will admit that a lot of my posts are only a few sentences long, stating my opinion, but with the exception of topics I am passionate about (and this post) I honestly have better things to do than write essays on a forum of which provide me no real value other than an ego stroking. I do however have valid points to make and enjoy a small conversation or two. I'm bringing this up because I can't think of any other reason why my posts are getting killed immediately.

Here's a little bit of proof...

Viewing a thread in which I've posted through a proxy: http://i.imgur.com/teDjg.png

Viewing the same thread logged in as myself: http://i.imgur.com/ohmtk.png

Remember, all of my submissions from that username (and I'm assuming IP as well) are killed... and loading any page takes forever. The only explanation I can come up with is that this is some new method to rid HN of certain people. This is obviously Paul's baby and he can of course do whatever the hell he wants with it, but it's pretty uncool to waste my time by killing all my posts and delaying page loads without telling me anything is up. (Side note: I have a feeling some of you may bring up the tone of the first comment of mine (defending PHP) that was killed... but much worse has undoubtedly been tolerated. So is it because I'm not following the hate-on-PHP herd? I thought the whole purpose here was to promote intelligent discussion - and that certainly can't take place without opposition.)

I've also tested the voting ability on my usual account - that also no longer works... even though, like everything else I do through my usual account, it's made to look like it's working. This strengthens my hypothesis that this method has been implemented to slowly weed out certain users from HN in a way that they aren't aware that they're being weeded out... most likely to reduce any confrontation.

I had actually posted this much earlier (at a wrong time so it got buried shortly after) and a couple of people suggested I had been flagged as spam or an asshole, and this is most certainly not the case. Out of all my comments only ONE is in the negatives and the majority of them do provide somewhat of a meaningful discussion. (See http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TimothyBurgess) It had also been suggested that I create a new account. That's not going to happen. I shouldn't have been "hellbanned" in the first place.

I think what happened is that a user (probably http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rikthevik) strongly disagreed with my post and flagged it.