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 gr

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.