On mobile so can’t check but from memory there is very simplistic JavaScript on the pages and the vote buttons are just links (maybe form Post buttons) that return a http 204 (no content) response that effectively stops the browser from doing anything. The vote counts is just a preemptive ui update with no error checking.

It’s always been this way.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/204

Yep. They're simply <a> tags. The code inside `onclick` is very primitive:

    if (u.pathname == '/vote') {
      vote(p.get('id'), p.get('how'), p.get('auth'), p.get('goto'));
    }

`vote` just sees if it's an up or a down, set's the unvote link's `innerHTML`, then, curiously, uses an `Image` object to make the request:

    new Image().src = vurl(id, how, auth, _goto);

The code is only 152 lines and is very easy to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/hn.js

The Image makes sense as a way to make HTTP requests before XMLHttpRequest was widely supported.

Hacker News isn't that old. It launched in 2007 at which point XMLHttpRequest had been implemented in all major browsers for several years.

On the desktop yes, but it was on the cusp of the smartphone era so there were many weird mobile browsers around.

The advantage of XMLHttpRequest is that you get feedback through a callback. When the user clicks the vote arrows, they could turn into something else (such as a spinner) that would disappear when the API request finishes. If my internet is spotty, having some feedback (so I know my votes didn't timeout) would be nice.

I can confirm this too. Sometimes I'd quickly scan through comments, then go back to the top and upvote good ones (usually faster than 1/second). Since a child comment sometimes gives greater clarity to a parent comment. When refreshing and noticing votes weren't applied, I thought I triggered some shadowbanning mechanism.

My votes fail silently if I click on whatever link to read the article to see if it's any good or not, then click the browser back button to go back to HN to then upvote. After I vote, I always manually refresh the page, and indeed it didn't go through so then I have to click the upvote button again.

I can confirm. For this reason I'm constantly refreshing the page if I think my vote is important.

Related, my account is shadow-blocked from up/down voting posts, and I think from flag/vouch as well. I think there was a period where I was too aggressive in moderation and it must have triggered something.

I can test this by checking a poster's karma before and after voting - I used to be able to see the increment/decrement and now I can't.

I can still upvote stories.

Same in my case. At the end of the day, it's just another form of censorship. It broke the illusion I had of HN being something special and I'm glad it did. Better spend that energy elsewhere.

I, for one, hope that HN never becomes this unmoderated hellscape many people seem to want it to be.

HN has had moderators from day one. If you want a censorship-free forum those do exist - there are places on the internet that do the bare minimum of moderation and only remove illegal content. Unfortunately, only the worst members of society seem to frequent these types of forums, and that isn't a coincidence.

The problem with shadow bans and most moderation is they basically all eventually just make the user's account have no voice at all and its not redeemable. Sure this helps with spam, but on a long enough time frame these types of systems would ban even their best users. In fighting spam and other abuse we take approaches that don't mirror real life at all, even the most rigid humans will forgive.

I don't know why you consider those two words to be synonyms.

If anything, they are opposing concepts. You moderate a discussion exactly to prevent censorship.

"Moderation" that results in censorship is censorship, not "moderation".

> You moderate a discussion exactly to prevent censorship.

No, you might moderate a discussion to prevent censorship but that is not the definition or even a necessary goal of moderation.

> there are places on the internet that do the bare minimum of moderation and only remove illegal content. Unfortunately, only the worst members of society seem to frequent these types of forums

Could you link to worst examples? I think that finding these with search engines might be difficult.

There is a shadow banned sibling post to this, which given the subject would be worth including. I did vouch but I don't think my votes count as I explained. If you turn on showdead in your settings, you can see the post and vouch for it

Agreed - my last post. I am so livid learning that this is how HN works. And there is -no excuse- for this so called "dark pattern". Want to take away certain features, well just disable arrows for that user.

And this also reminds of the completely opaque privacy position of this forum. Who are these 3rd parties, and what precisely do they get from YCombinator?

- Ciao and thanks for the fish!

> At the end of the day, it's just another form of censorship.

This is how I feel right now, since there doesn’t seem to be a good way to openly debate the policies (or dark patterns like shadow bans) once you become subject to actions taken under those policies. All you can do is appeal to the moderators by email. It’s something, but a private conversation isn’t the same as a community debate. And a community debate isn’t possible once you are silenced. I’m not sure what the right solution is.

In my case, someone called me a nitwit and my response to them was deemed engaging in a flamewar even though I was mostly just clarifying my earlier comment/stance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30255599). And then upon further investigation from the moderator, I apparently didn’t have the right mix of topics I post on and was deemed to be engaging in ideological battle. It seems arbitrary to me because here are the topics I see in my recent comments: Canada protest, climate change, Neil Young, biometric identity verification, a tool to contact representatives, the Olympics, MacBook Pros, Google Slides, GoFundMe (I had many comments on this one admittedly), search engine results, Delta airline policy, compensation trends, cars, Microsoft Teams, mathematics, Roku spyware, and rent increases.

So what is a well meaning user to do if they want to just engage on the stories most meaningful to them? Is it really a bad thing to post on topics that are controversial rather than straightforward? On the other hand, I am not sure what other community is better than HN, even if I dislike censorship. So maybe they’re doing something right and I’m on the wrong side of it after all.

Your comment caught my attention. I took a look.

You're right that the exchange you linked to wasn't banworthy. But that exchange wasn't the problem.

The fundamental problem is that you're not writing from a position of intellectual curiosity. But the real issue is that you're interfering with why people come to the site: to be entertained. Almost all moderation actions make sense when viewed through that lens, and it took many years to realize and accept this hard truth.

People mostly aren't here for some sort of enlightenment, or to save the world, or to have their minds changed about politics. When you post here, you're broadcasting to millions of people, and around 50k of them see and engage with the top comments on a thread.

That's the high level overview. Zooming back into your account, within the last week you've posted almost entirely on political topics. That's not necessarily a bad thing (but it's usually a bad sign). The issue is that you have to frame these topics in a very delicate, substantive (double underscores on "substantive") way.

In the "Florida governor to investigate GoFundMe" thread, you spawned ten different subthreads. In the future, when you sense a topic is making you want to talk this much, you should treat it as an alarm, and pay close attention. (This helped me break some old habits, and I hope it helps you when you do get unbanned.)

If you collapse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225484, you'll notice that there are 90 total comments underneath that tree. That's a flamewar. It also happens to be a political flamewar, which is the worst type for HN's goals.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30254810 has 24 comments. It's a flamewar; almost explicitly so:

> More importantly, Neil Young has shown himself to be for censorship and against the free exchange of ideas. His stance is fundamentally at odds with free societies that harbor enlightenment values.

These were the worst, but your comments are doing the equivalent of tossing around molotovs. It's no surprise that some of them start fires.

When you do this repeatedly, it's the moderation team's duty to ban you. Again, people come here primarily for entertainment. You need to internalize this in order to experience a meaningful long-term change in behavior.

I'm spending this much time talking with you because I sense that you're a thoughtful person. But when you care so much about politics, you need to channel those energies somewhere else. Twitter is a decent one; it's where I took refuge when I was banned. https://lobste.rs/ too, when you want to talk about technical topics. Their stories often overlap HN's, and the crew there has unique perspectives relative to HN's audience. I like them a lot.

If you're still not convinced... Remember that old cartoon Good Idea, Bad Idea? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9erKbsQW8C0&ab_channel=THEDU...

Here are some examples of what it would frame as a Bad Idea on HN:

- Picking a fight with Dan over moderation policies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225929

- Posting a comment saying Merriam Webster is among the worst dictionaries, because they're politically activist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225625

- Saying that GoFundMe's decision to pause donations to Canada truckers was due to government pressure, and calling it a "chilling and tyrannical suppression of the right to protest": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30200795

- Calling eviction bans an "unconstitutional seizure of private property": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30144862

I could go on and on, and I haven't even reached two weeks into your account history. But it's 3 am.

The trouble is, it doesn't matter whether you're correct about the things that you're saying. I might even agree with you that eviction bans are interfering with property rights. But when you frame it as an "unconstitutional seizure of private property," that's an entirely different matter. At that point, the war drums are banging, and you're the drummer.

Here's what I would recommend you do. First, internalize that if you're banned, no one will miss you. (They didn't miss me.)

Second, decide whether you wish to participate on HN. (I did.)

Third, read Dan's reply to you, ideally several times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30274971

Then read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(I just reviewed them myself, and learned that I was recently guilty of "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." So this is a good exercise.)

Once you've internalized that HN is for curious conversation, start trying to have some. I recommend you restrict yourself to technical topics. Do this for at least one week.

At the end of the week, email hn@ycombinator.com, link to those comments, and explain that you understand now that HN isn't meant for political flamewar and that you'll try (hard) not to fall back into your old habits.

If you follow this recipe to a T, there's a good chance you'll be unbanned and happily HN'ing within a month.

The truth is that you're lucky. You have a straightforward path towards becoming unbanned. Mine included not being able to post to the site at all, even while banned.

Good luck. If you'd like to talk more extensively about this, you're always welcome to DM me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theshawwn I'm happy to lend an ear and to keep you company while you're banned.

The key is to just find a topic that makes you happy, and talk a lot about that. Mine turned out to be ML. It's difficult (though not impossible) to damage HN by nerding out about ML. And frankly, I don't miss the days when I was trying to talk about heated topics. Perhaps in a year or two you'll feel the same way.

On a totally unrelated side note, I profoundly want to thank you for pointing out that threads can be collapsed.

I am using GN since 2011 now and never knew this. I wondered how and just now realized the small '-' at the end of a comment headline. This was really a revelation to ne right now.

Have a great day.

There are also browser add-ons[0] which give HN quite a few QoL improvements. Similar to what RES does to Reddit.

[0] https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

For sure! Lots of new features are pretty subtle. Thread collapsing was added in.. 2016 or 2017, I think. It’s relatively recent, at least when viewed from HN’s total history.

I think I know when it happened to me: I vouched for a comment that I thought made a good logical argument, by a user who is perpetually shadow-banned (redis-something). That's a good lesson to not vouch anymore.

I have learned from past experience that moderation and COC end up being used to push an agenda. If you don't agree with whatever that agenda is, leave the site quickly and find another community worth your time. Don't spend time on someone else's spilled milk.

For what it’s worth, this could also be a scaling thing, with upvotes taking longer to be processed in some queue somewhere.

Yes I considered this, and I can't be sure without some "official" information. But I've played with it enough that I've convinced myself of it. I could create another account to compare, but it's not important. Eventually I'll start fresh from a new account and I'll confirm then that there is a difference.

I just tested it now and i had no affect on your karma. I suspect it's only half- blocked (i.e sometimes works, sometimes doesn't) but i'm a little bit miffed, what with my high karma.

I can confirm that I've upvoted your comment and did not see a change to your karma. However, when I upvote a submission and refresh the page, I always see the submission's points go up. I can't tell whether my comment votes are being ignored (or diminished or delayed) by HN, or if this is just the result of how HN tabulates points and karma. (I don't think comment/submission upvotes from users with less than 10 or 11 karma count at all.[1] This is also how I remembered it when I first joined HN.)

Reddit uses a formula to transform upvotes into karma that awards less karma for each additional upvote.[2] I suspect that HN uses 1 or more similar formulas to transform (i) comment upvotes -> comment points, and/or (ii) comment points -> user karma. Since points and karma are only displayed as integers, the formula would sometimes prevent your comment upvote from visibly affecting the user's karma.

I don't think HN uses a formula to convert submission upvotes -> submission points, though I could be wrong. On the other hand, we can easily verify that the submission points -> user karma transformation is not 1:1 by looking at a throwaway account that has only made 1 submission and no comments.[3]

If dang could clarify what's going on, I would greatly appreciate it!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439396

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/e9c88r/upda...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=throwawaygoaway (300 karma) / https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=throwawaygoaway (911 points)

If you email dang using the footer contact link, I imagine he’d appreciate the heads up that this post and your comment exists, so that a reply could be considered. Otherwise there’s every possibility it’ll be missed in the crowd.

Interesting. Maybe there is a delay then? I know that when a comment I make is up or down voted, it accrues directly to my total karma.

Uh... nobody here is going to mention caching? This is clearly the effect of caching. Why would everyone here be shadow banned?

How do you know cached pages are being fetched? One would be shadowbanned for the same as reasons one is banned. Every large social media company does shadow banning.

It’s not. My other accounts have been blocked this way too. It’s also in the original codebase.

You did not trigger anything, they take your privileges manually. But I don't know if it's permanent.

AFAIK mod actions are always permanent unless you notice (they won't always tell you, and sometimes when they do, it's in a comment days or weeks back that you probably won't notice unless you manually review your entire comment history on a regular basis) and contact the mods and apologize, or the mods just happen to change their mind.

I saw a clearly oblivious poster, who's been commenting quite regularly who has been [dead] since 2013. I couldn't see anything controversial in his history.

I'd love to see who you're taking about. I keep showdead on and sometimes look at the comments history of dead comments. I don't think I've ever seen a profile that left me guessing as to why they were banned.

I’ll volunteer myself as an example, as I was recently shadow banned (or some variant of banned). My other comment in this discussion has some details. I don’t think I am particularly controversial but maybe you can share a different perspective.

What does dead mean in this context.. I have one dead in my history iirc. Am I shadow banned?

This is what happened to me. I was shadowbanned or something like it for a comment made a few days earlier. The mod did tell me but I didn’t realize it because I would have needed to look through my comment history. I had no idea until another user pointed it out to me.

I recommend users to create a new account as soon as they notice something funny (like comments that get marked as dead automatically, votes/flags that stop counting, stupid ratelimits, etc)

When I see comments like this, I always suspect there are probably other reasons why a person might be banned or ghosted or rate limited or whatever. I'll spend 5 seconds looking at their profile history and, well, let's just say I'm never too surprised.

How do you know this? There must be the threat of bots that automatically mod, for example, or people that just up or down mod every comment for vandalism or to see what happens. I assume there would be some automatic safeguards against this built in

Think about this, there is no notification system on HN. If you got any errors, you'd better send an email to the moderators here.

I did this when I first created the ID, the moderator helped me out. Or my ID will be shadow blocked. :D

Sounds like a feature.

Can confirm, I'm not able to downvote, so censorship is real

You don't have enough karma. I think downvote is 500?

You need 501 karma: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...

whoever downvoted me is proving my point