Though I have studied HN a lot, I am not a moderator and I do not have
access to the actual code running on HN. The "basic" code behind HN
(NEWS.YC) is publicly available in the ARC language distribution, but PG
is running a modified version here. Without source code or moderator
access, along with my well publicized lack of mind reading skills, I
simply cannot tell you why your account was "hellbanned" (i.e. all posts
from the account are immediately marked "[dead]").

Even if you're a long time user with substantial karma and "show dead"
enabled in your profile, there are times when you're still unable to see
posts from some "hellbanned" users. With this said, even if I knew which
SOPA thread you're talking about, and what user-name you were using, I
might not be able to see said problematic posts. You are essentially
asking me for blind speculation.

The best I can tell you from blind speculation is you probably let your
emotions get the better of you in the discussion, others decided you
were acting like an ass, and they flagged your comments. Since you admit
to "feeling strongly" about the topic, you were most likely pushing your
opinion, and hence, your agenda... --And others pushed back. The other
thing to realize is, in highly political and divisive topics there are
most likely groups/rings at work trying to suppress the most vocal (or
acerbic) posters. As far as I know, there is no such thing as "perfect"
ring detection since differentiating it from group-think would be very
problematic. If you've read any of PG's code, or any of his coding books
(OnLisp, ANSI Common Lisp), you'll agree he's pretty darn good at
coding, but even for him, "perfect" ring detection is probably beyond
feasible.

So, with blind speculation, you've got three possibilities:

1.) You added a bit too much spice to your comments.

2.) You were on the wrong side of a voting/flagging ring.

3.) You were on the wrong side of consensus / group-think (i.e. you have
an uncommon and contentious opinion).

Just because you could see up-votes on your comments does not mean you
can see the 'flags' they have received, so you're basing your evaluation
on incomplete information.

The last possibility is clearly stated in the HN Guidelines:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

Sure, SOPA intersects with tech and hacking, and even PG himself got in
on the action by taking a stand on it, but none the less, it's still
politics. You pushed heavily on comparisons to Nazi Germany (see
"Godwin's Law") and voiced strong advocacy of Ron Paul. You might want
to note that one rather prolific HN poster described Ron Paul as a
"Mendacious Kook," so your opinion is not universally accepted and
promoting your opinion is essentially pushing a political agenda. The
result, of course, is the same "Ron Paul Spam" problems seen on Reddit.
This is not Reddit. Here on HN, there is no way to compartmentalize
topics (i.e. "sub-reddits") to prevent political pressure over-load.

You may have been up-voted by those who share your political views, but
you were also most likely flagged for voicing those views here. If you
want to discuss general politics, HN is the wrong place to do it.

My hunch is that you've been banned twice for going political in a place
were it's clearly against the guidelines.

And no, just because you see PG occasionally breaking his own guidelines
does not give you, or anyone, license to turn this place into yet
another political forum. Hacker (nee Startup) News is his party, and the
rest of us are just guests here.

On the bright side, if you study both the NEWS.YC source code and posts
made by PG regarding his modifications to the HN version, you'll notice
he has a rather consistent habit of using time as a factor in a lot of
his calculations. If you got yourself banned for some reason, the ban
may or may not be permanent. I suggest that you give your old account
another try in a couple of weeks. Though I'm too tired to dig up a
reference for you, I do remember reading something about bans being time
limited in much the same way that there's a timer to prevent/slow-down
replies for the sake of preventing flame wars. I could be mistaken, but
none the less, I'm remembering something about this.

Looking at your posts under the 'ldar15' account shows none of them
currently marked as '[dead]' so it seems as if your ban timed-out.
I don't have total recall, so until someone posts a link to a post by PG
stating that not all bans are permanent, the only safe bet is to
consider your un-banning as just a coincidence. ;)

For notes, there has been one, and only one, time when I was actually
concerned about a down-vote I received. I was interacting directly with
PG, and quickly got down-voted. Since my reply to him would show up in
his "Threads" page, and the down-vote occurred so quickly, I was
unnecessarily concerned the down-vote came from PG --the guy nice enough
to provide this site to me any everyone else. In that case, I just sent
PG a polite email to make sure I hadn't stepped on any toes. It wasn't
him, and it wasn't a big deal to him, but contacting him privately was
the most polite way I could think of handling it.

Lastly, there is a known degree of randomness in voting, and there are
known problems with up/down link placement on some devices (particularly
mobile devices with touch screens). Though I have had moments where I
wondered, "Why (the expletive) am I being down-voted?" often, it's not
as big of a deal as it seems. Sometimes I communicate poorly. Sometimes
I fail to be perfectly clear. Sometimes I get things wrong. Sometimes
I'm a bit too spicy in my replies. But sometimes, people just click the
wrong button by mistake. It happens to everyone. Learning from mistakes
is good, but being overly concerned about it is a waste of time.