zlacker

>>vincen+(OP)
One of the things about Hackernews karma system is that a lot of downvotes get filtered out as fraudulent. However, once you are “targeted” that filter is removed and downvotes against you become more powerful. I used to have a very high karma nearing 1000, and then one day it’s like a switch got flipped and my karma began a decline that never stopped, a year later I’ve been completely drained of karma. I might never really recover. It’s a bad feedback loop because when you know nothing you say or do can make things better there is less incentive to be cordial in your messages.

>>xwdv+Kc
You're talking about the mechanism that sama wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973. We recently restored the code to mostly work the way it did before that, so this effect should be less strong than it was. On the other hand, if you were to do a slightly better job of using HN in the intended spirit (and sticking to the site guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), we'd be happy to take the penalty off your account. The problem is that you're still posting comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026954.

It's really hard to devise software protections to help HN stay within its mandate that don't at the same time end up penalizing a certain amount of benign activity. It's a bit like how white blood cells also kill some things that aren't a threat. But the solution is not to turn off the white blood cells - that would be really bad.