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No, it isn't, it's something particular HNers like to complain about due to some over zealous sense of free speech or something like that. Why could this not ha

No, it isn't, it's something particular HNers like to complain about due to some over zealous sense of free speech or something like that. Why could this not have been handled silently through an admin, like you would anywhere else where this might happen? The problem is that HN has turned into a monster of a forum, and to know everything that goes on behind the scenes to keep it functioning and to set up guidelines that navigate this perfectly is utopian. False positives and accidents happen, admins welcome reports of these, I don't get what the community gets out of them, though.

ErrantX 17y ago
pg is the admin; at a guess queries like this would usually take a while to get a response. Someone here would probably be able to answer the question faster.
- theblackbox 17y ago
  I don't see how this differs from asking for advice on IRC when you have failed to take even the most cursory of glances at Google to track down the solution yourself. This is a golden rule of IRC support. Other than taking a little more time, the situation is exactly the same.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    AFAIK this hasn't been answered before (that's from 30s on searchyc). We were discussing emailing pg a short while ago and the consensus then seemed to be "only if it's really important".
  - elblanco 17y ago
    Particularly because things like this are not always the result of pg personally moderating or killing accounts. Many times it's due to user abuse. AFAIK, HN grants different levels of power to users based on their karma. When I first joined, I couldn't downvote, and could only comment a couple times a day. Who's to say that the guys on here http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders don't have some kind of uber-user power because of their high karma score? We've already established in a number of threads over the past few months that some of these folks (to be left unnamed) have invested remarkable effort into attaining these scores and think very highly of themselves and don't feel the need to answer to anyone for their otherwise abusive behavior (like hitting the downvote cap %, or flagging users they don't like etc.). More interesting is that the community discussion around those guys' behavior also showed interesting patterns in the way HN works. Eventually pg shows up and says something like "yeah well, if your karma is above 10k, and you have a 30% upvote surplus, and it's a thursday, you can kill user accounts, but only 2 a year, unless their name starts with a t,s,kh, or an odd number." and then somebody posts the relevant arc source for that. We all then walk away scratching our heads as to why that's something built into the site, but we have no internal mail system or simple way of contacting the admins.

ErrantX 17y ago

pg is the admin; at a guess queries like this would usually take a while to get a response. Someone here would probably be able to answer the question faster.

theblackbox 17y ago
I don't see how this differs from asking for advice on IRC when you have failed to take even the most cursory of glances at Google to track down the solution yourself. This is a golden rule of IRC support. Other than taking a little more time, the situation is exactly the same.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  AFAIK this hasn't been answered before (that's from 30s on searchyc). We were discussing emailing pg a short while ago and the consensus then seemed to be "only if it's really important".
- elblanco 17y ago
  Particularly because things like this are not always the result of pg personally moderating or killing accounts. Many times it's due to user abuse. AFAIK, HN grants different levels of power to users based on their karma. When I first joined, I couldn't downvote, and could only comment a couple times a day. Who's to say that the guys on here http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders don't have some kind of uber-user power because of their high karma score? We've already established in a number of threads over the past few months that some of these folks (to be left unnamed) have invested remarkable effort into attaining these scores and think very highly of themselves and don't feel the need to answer to anyone for their otherwise abusive behavior (like hitting the downvote cap %, or flagging users they don't like etc.). More interesting is that the community discussion around those guys' behavior also showed interesting patterns in the way HN works. Eventually pg shows up and says something like "yeah well, if your karma is above 10k, and you have a 30% upvote surplus, and it's a thursday, you can kill user accounts, but only 2 a year, unless their name starts with a t,s,kh, or an odd number." and then somebody posts the relevant arc source for that. We all then walk away scratching our heads as to why that's something built into the site, but we have no internal mail system or simple way of contacting the admins.