3 ms·

I've had varied experiences with sites and banning. A couple of years ago, I made a funny picture site where I would collect some of these visual jokes. (plug:

I've had varied experiences with sites and banning. A couple of years ago, I made a funny picture site where I would collect some of these visual jokes. (plug: http://caption-of-the-day.com http://caption-of-the-day.com) I never submitted here, of course, but I also got zero traction on reddit. It always seemed weird to me that reddit was such a wasteland for that material, especially when there was so much of it on there. Then this year, before the NSA story broke, I figured privacy and anonymity would be a big issue, one I was passionate about. So I created http://freedom-or-safety.com http://freedom-or-safety.com It's a mix of rewriting long stories into 3-5 paragraph summaries (with appropriate links back), and original commentary. Since the majority of stuff on that site was technology/privacy related, and since many of my friends are here and like that kind of stuff, I submitted a lot of it on HN. Then I got banned on HN. Beats me how. Still waiting to figure that one out. I asked to be reinstated and I was, but without knowing what I've done it makes it really difficult to avoid doing it again. I've stopped creating content over there while I figure out if it's worth getting another ban here because of who-knows-what. Sucks to have your work silenced due to forces outside your control and understanding. I really feel for all those other meme sites struggling away on reddit all that while. How many hundreds or thousands of hours of productivity were destroyed trying to honestly work with a system that was rigged all along? We like to think of these aggregation sites as pristine, driven by the user voice, and automatically selecting and promoting good content. But after many years on several such sites, and after submitting my own stuff on several of them, I don't have such a charitable opinion. I like HN, and I really like the folks here, but in their effort to keep the site cleaned up, they've created an opaque and non-intuitive system. In many ways, this has the same effect on trust as having a crooked moderator. Things just don't make sense and don't feel right, but hell if you can put your finger on exactly what's going on.

snowwrestler 13y ago
> It's a mix of rewriting long stories into 3-5 paragraph summaries (with appropriate links back), and original commentary. I never read your site so please take this with a grain of salt. But I assume the long stories were not your writing, right? You were taking other people's writing and condensing it down. That's not really that valuable or useful, and might have violated this part of the HN guidelines: > Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
tzs 13y ago
> Then I got banned on HN. Beats me how. Still waiting to figure that one out. I asked to be reinstated and I was, but without knowing what I've done it makes it really difficult to avoid doing it again. HN bans often seem completely arbitrary. I recently turned on "showdead" to see what gets banned, and have come across some quite puzzling ones. For instance, there is greenpizza13 [1]. His offense appears to have been posting a comment that called that "wat" video "hilarious". Even more puzzling is luka1413 [2]. Just two comments. Neither particularly useful, but not offensive and certainly no more useless than many of the comments of regulars here. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greenpizza13 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greenpizza13 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luka1413 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luka1413
- tptacek 13y ago
  There might be a voting ring detector thing happening here, too.

snowwrestler 13y ago

> It's a mix of rewriting long stories into 3-5 paragraph summaries (with appropriate links back), and original commentary. I never read your site so please take this with a grain of salt. But I assume the long stories were not your writing, right? You were taking other people's writing and condensing it down. That's not really that valuable or useful, and might have violated this part of the HN guidelines: > Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

tzs 13y ago

> Then I got banned on HN. Beats me how. Still waiting to figure that one out. I asked to be reinstated and I was, but without knowing what I've done it makes it really difficult to avoid doing it again. HN bans often seem completely arbitrary. I recently turned on "showdead" to see what gets banned, and have come across some quite puzzling ones. For instance, there is greenpizza13 [1]. His offense appears to have been posting a comment that called that "wat" video "hilarious". Even more puzzling is luka1413 [2]. Just two comments. Neither particularly useful, but not offensive and certainly no more useless than many of the comments of regulars here. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greenpizza13 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greenpizza13 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luka1413 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luka1413

tptacek 13y ago
There might be a voting ring detector thing happening here, too.