[responding to myself since both child comments are [dead] -- I hope you see this]

blasterford2 2 hours ago | link [dead]

Thanks hackernews for silently banning my account for posting a couple of non-abusive, pretty well backed up opinions.

Well done! Censorship at its best.

Hacker news used to be good. What the hell happened.

Be careful what you say on HN. If it goes against the agenda of YC or is critical of past YC funded companies, you'll be banned.

I think it's just that the anti-spam/anti-troll algorithms have become very sensitive to flagging and/or downvotes. I think I heard that greater weight is given to flags and downvotes by highly respected users (the list of which which is probably also algorithmically determined). Some of those weighted users are bound to be human and (over)react to criticism of their friends-of-friends' companies with flags or downvotes.

An example: a while ago I reluctantly clicked "flag" on a comment that really didn't belong, to the extent of warranting more than a downvote (which I also do incredibly rarely). I must have been among the flags+votes that pushed the comment over some algorithmic threshold, as the comment immediately became [dead]. Your second account, created for this comment, probably met the same fate due to the comment's reactionary nature.

I know what it feels like to worry about being cut off from a community. A few weeks ago I read about another account that got auto-killed, and the user didn't figure it out for quite a long time. I ran a couple of tests on my account to see if I was "slow banned" and accidentally scared myself by not realizing that the HN delay setting has an upper bound of 10m. My delay setting was 20m, so it took me a couple of days to figure out why my posts started out [dead] for 10m. I eventually found the original thread where pg explained the delay setting, the only place where the 10m max delay is mentioned, and realized what was going on.

I do agree that some topics on HN elicit more downvoting and flagging than they should. I ardently avoid commenting on any Apple-related articles, for example. Most of the risky topics can still be addressed by wording one's comments more carefully, but sometimes even the most insightful comment will be met with downvotes.

I used to get my intellectual discussion fix from the Off Topic thread on Groklaw. I discovered Hacker News when someone posted a link to YCombinator and slowly became converted. I finally left Groklaw when I realized that it achieved its S/N ratio in large measure by aggressive human intervention and moderation (and... getting face-slapped by Peter H. Salus, who had (has?) a lot of sway on Groklaw, certainly helped my decision to leave). I'm a technology lover to the core, so I'll take HN's touchy human-guided anti-spam algorithms over a 100% human-driven system any day.

I haven't found any place quite like Hacker News. It's not quite as nice as it was when I first joined (back then the existing HN regulars joined forces to fill the front page with articles about esoteric programming languages like Erlang to drive away a recent influx of new traffic, of which I was a part -- those articles convinced me to stay). However, the comment quality on most of the articles I read still exceeds anything I've found anywhere else. Try reading a comment thread on Ars Technica, for example -- full of trolls, shills, and overreactions.

I'm in no way connected to HN or YC, apart from unsuccessfully applying to YC quite a while ago. I've just sort of taken it upon myself to find [dead] accounts that I don't think deserve to be so and post comments like this one. As such I hope you'll give HN another chance (adjust your commenting strategy, and maybe try e-mailing someone at YC about your existing account -- tracking down such an e-mail address is left as an exercise for the reader). [I also hope I'm not upsetting pg or the YC alumni who serve as moderators by posting these comments - please say so if you'd like me to stop]