It's not nutty, it's what hacker news does. After getting down-voted a certain amount you get hell-banned. Your posts are still posted, except only people with

It's not nutty, it's what hacker news does. After getting down-voted a certain amount you get hell-banned. Your posts are still posted, except only people with "show dead" enabled see them. Before that however you just get throttled and the site loads more slowly.