I have multiple accounts that you (or somebody) hell-banned, with real genuine content, and the described process was not followed.
Thank you for, once again, proving that you’re a low integrity individual.
Thank you for, once again, proving that you’re a low integrity individual.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that with your previous accounts that we were aware of, the "real genuine content" was pretty trollish. When users keep creating accounts like that, we stop telling them that we're banning them, because they know perfectly well what they're doing, as do we. This is all explained at the links I mentioned upthread.
We do make mistakes, and when we find out about them, we apologize and try to correct things. But shadowbanning accounts that are innocently posting "real genuine content" isn't anything we normally do.
For example my first account, which admittedly didn't have top quality content, hardly did anything worthy of a ban by today's standards.
HN was moderated differently in the early years because pg was running it in whatever hours he could eke out between running YC and having small children. That was a totally different situation than now. It's a miracle the site stayed up at all.
It's not clear why that account was banned, unless it was related to other accounts that did bad things? (You don't have to answer that.) In any case, I've unbanned it now and restored the affected posts, in case that's helpful.
But there’s no value in arguing over this. I long ago decided it was more fun to burn the bridge (by rudely stating things that are true) on this set of browser/cookies/account/IPs. I’m not going to dox myself to prove that your second paragraph was wrong. Especially when I concede that _after_ I got banned stupidly and unfairly, I decided to fight back by becoming ban-worthy.
The “optimist” in me thinks your a decent person who happens to have some big blind spots and biases, and you might eventually figure out how to address them if you meet the right set of people and start to learn from folks who don’t look like you. Maybe you’d realize that there are a collection of things that HN encourages, all of which contribute to a “safe space” for certain people, while excluding others.
I hope my optimistic view is eventually right.
Edit: thank you to the peer post to this comment that gives an example of this happening to them a long time ago. I didn’t want to dox myself to show it’s a real thing.
I’m adding this as an ‘edit’ instead of a reply to the peer post because this account is just barely allowed to post at all.
7 years is surely long enough to establish a new moderation policy on a website. If that's really the reason why you're still abusing HN after all this time, I think you should reconsider.