downvotes cause you to be essentially a lite-shadow ban if they happen enough, especially if in a flagged thread/comment. You get rate limited, which means only 5 comments per day allowed. Max.
So, sorry, but while I didn't downvote you, I do disagree with you; entirely. Validly.
That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site.
The thread also has interesting discussions on other mod tools: shadowbanning, IP bans, and the like.
Apparently the way to un-rate-limit an account is to send in an email and mention that you will "stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Some amount of convincing prostration may be required, as a sort of high-level turing test. There does not seem to be a way to do this while not giving away your email address (which was not required at signup).
The moderator mentioned something about repeated, human-written warnings before rate-limiting, but this does not seem to be the case now (2020) - rate limiting seems to be a milder, less-known variant of the shadowban.
Look. All I know is what I looked up, and have read in the past; and that I wasn't rate limited until after I commented on a thread that suddenly got mega-flagged and I deleted my comment to try to be safe. Wasn't fast enough I guess, cause either an auto-bot just rate limited everyone in it; or a mod did.
Prior to that, I wasn't rate limited. After that, I was. Make of it what you will.
So, sorry, but while I didn't downvote you, I do disagree with you; entirely. Validly.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...
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> TL;DR: apparently this can happen due to an account being "rate-limited". Rate-limited accounts can post a max of five posts within 24 hours.
See : https://hn.nuxtjs.org/item/15507821
Specifically this bit:
dang 1018 days ago
That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site.
The thread also has interesting discussions on other mod tools: shadowbanning, IP bans, and the like.
Apparently the way to un-rate-limit an account is to send in an email and mention that you will "stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Some amount of convincing prostration may be required, as a sort of high-level turing test. There does not seem to be a way to do this while not giving away your email address (which was not required at signup).
The moderator mentioned something about repeated, human-written warnings before rate-limiting, but this does not seem to be the case now (2020) - rate limiting seems to be a milder, less-known variant of the shadowban.
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