zlacker

>>itchyj+(OP)
The one thing I don't like is when comments become "dead", which I understand happens after too many downvotes.

The reason I dislike this, is that besides obviously racist or otherwise inappropriate comments, there are regularly normal seeming comments that are dead. Now, there may be reasons for this I am just not privy to, but I feel it hinders discussion when some opinions that don't seem problematic are just silenced like this.

[Edit]: And rereading my own comment, I think I want to clarify that I am not talking about free speech issues or political discussions here, but I regularly encounter factual seeming or explanatory comments in technical discussions that are dead and it just baffles me.

>>Grumbl+Gb
Registering an account through a VPN is an automatic shadowban without warning. How is a new user supposed to know this?

Hacker News is a lot less hospitable in reality than it seems to an outsider. If you just register a lurker account and enable showdead and look around it's a veritable zombietown in here.

>>Zinnia+Af
> Registering an account through a VPN is an automatic shadowban

That's not true.

New accounts are subject to extra software restrictions because of past abuses by trolls and spammers, though. I don't see any way around this.

>>dang+5p
Ok. I can only speculate unless you want to document.

I'll guess again! My VPN just happened to be IP banned which I had no way of knowing before registering.

I'm sure new people appreciate being labeled as abusive trolls and spammers just for registering and I’m sure new people don't stay either.

>>Zinnia+Ms
A lot of "new people" who show up to complain about HN are not "new people" at all but ones who have been banned many times and are well aware of it. Typically they create a new account to come back in the front door before the back door has swung shut behind them. A favorite sport before doing that is to leave a message with the old account about how $snarkism HN is and how they're leaving and never coming back.

If you or anyone has suggestions for how to better write software to distinguish between genuinely new accounts and serial abusers, I'm sure we'd be very interested.

>>dang+jC
Another baby that gets thrown away with the bathwater are new throwaway accounts used to post controversial stuff or to whistle-blow their companies. Unfortunately there's no programmatic way to tell them apart from new accounts made for trolling as you point out.