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Silencing people makes this place an echo chamber. Their comment here was not out of place.

samatman 6y ago
You misunderstand the person you're replying to. People get shadowbanned here if they're obnoxious, or sometimes it's just bad luck. The comment you're complaining about was probably not specifically silenced, that poster is just in the hellban limbo. If you like a comment (and maybe you need enough karma?) you can click through to it and 'vouch' for it, which makes it visible.
dang 6y ago
The test for banning is not whether someone breaks the rules 100% of the time. That would be like saying I can drive as fast as I want because I slowed down in a school zone once. In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398463 it was a combination of the trollish username (not allowed on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20trollish%20username https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...) and the trollish early comments posted by the account. We're always happy to unban accounts if their history shows that they are now using the site as intended. If you notice such a case, the thing that will actually help your fellow user is to let us know about it at hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look. You can also vouch for a [dead] comment that shouldn't be dead—the fact that banned accounts sometimes post good comments is the reason we created vouching in the first place. (In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398463, we could probably unban the account if they were willing to change the trollish username. I'll email to check if they want to do that.) What's not so helpful is to post complainy comments about "mods deleting comments" and "echo chambers": they're not accurate, the fill the thread with offtopicness, and in the case where a user shouldn't be banned, they don't do anything to help that user.

You misunderstand the person you're replying to. People get shadowbanned here if they're obnoxious, or sometimes it's just bad luck. The comment you're complaining about was probably not specifically silenced, that poster is just in the hellban limbo. If you like a comment (and maybe you need enough karma?) you can click through to it and 'vouch' for it, which makes it visible.

dang 6y ago

The test for banning is not whether someone breaks the rules 100% of the time. That would be like saying I can drive as fast as I want because I slowed down in a school zone once. In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398463 it was a combination of the trollish username (not allowed on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20trollish%20username https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...) and the trollish early comments posted by the account. We're always happy to unban accounts if their history shows that they are now using the site as intended. If you notice such a case, the thing that will actually help your fellow user is to let us know about it at hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look. You can also vouch for a [dead] comment that shouldn't be dead—the fact that banned accounts sometimes post good comments is the reason we created vouching in the first place. (In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398463, we could probably unban the account if they were willing to change the trollish username. I'll email to check if they want to do that.) What's not so helpful is to post complainy comments about "mods deleting comments" and "echo chambers": they're not accurate, the fill the thread with offtopicness, and in the case where a user shouldn't be banned, they don't do anything to help that user.