Comment by lossolo

7 days ago

They're also shadow banning/silently disabling your votes, and they will not inform you about this. You think you're voting on stories or comments, but you aren't if they perceive your behavior as "upvote too many flamewar comments, culture-war/ideological battle comments, or otherwise low-quality comments for HN" and "if a user has a track record of upvoting comments that break the guidelines and/or downvoting good comments, or voting in ways that seem unfair – e.g., voting based on political side or personal acrimony, rather than on the objective merits of the comment itself".

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lossolo

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tptacek  7 days ago

This seems like an especially silly complaint on a site that is clear on the label about votes being just one of many signals deciding placement on pages and threads. We've known since 2008 that the HN experiment doesn't work if it runs off raw votes; you just get a front page full of memes.

  • lossolo  7 days ago

    If this were clearly public (like written in the rules) then maybe it wouldn't be worth mentioning. But if it isn't, it's good for people to know, so they understand how their voting habits can affect whether their votes count, right? That's why I mentioned it.