> Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots).
Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago before I'd submit it again. Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much.
> Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle (pronounced ‘Gackley’). He’s not of asian descent
??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
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So I'm guessing if you're from a country where that is a regular surname, you might assume it's like that and not DanG, so yeah I guess that happens
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
"Dang" is a surname in Vietnam, China, and elsewhere [1], which has led to subthreads like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643150 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25053380 in which, yes, people thought he was Asian.
Call me a fool, but it's never occurred to me that he wasn't. I've always pictured him as a Chinese gentleman, a sort of Confucian scholar in 0s and 1s holding up the mortal world to ancient standards of virtue.
I might come across as reading far too much xianxia, and that would be accurate.
Not just that, but for some time you could observe subthreads accusing him of being a chinese subversion of HN in china related discussions.
I agree, the paragraph is strange and at best reads like a non-sequitur.
Then again I always associated the username "dang" with the word "dang", which I thought it was an amusing (and appropriate) choice of name for a moderator.
Roughly 40% of all Vietnamese people are called "Nguyen", which makes it one of the most common family names in the world.
Also Diane in Bojack Horseman surname! Guessing she's of Vietnamese ascent!
The article is talking about stories that haven't got much attention. You can infer it from the quoted text mentioned just before the 3 rule:
>If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
What's more, since the people who wrote the code for this feature are pretty smart, it's hard to believe these two things are oversights.
Edit: In response to a now deleted comment on how this feature is intended to be annoying, because your contribution was deemed harmful, but not ban-worthy, I say this:
I disagree that this approach is correct in that case. If you want to discourage certain behavior, then, on a site such as HN, you should treat your users as adults and tell them what you don't want them to do. Simply locking them out for an unknown amount of time, for unknown reasons, is just going to drive them away. This is just basic operant conditioning. Presumably, driving the user away entirely is not the result one wants a significant portion of the time.
I don't see how it matters whether he's Asian or not. For all I care, he could be a sentient pineapple tree and it wouldn't matter at all to my HN user experience.
Some posts get reposted a lot see this website for example https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lihaoyi.com some were posted 7 times.
This thing is that almost any well written (and not too much technical) post can reach the frontpage it only requires 3-4 people who like the post enough to upvote it during the first 30 minutes. As a result reposting works for those kind of content. And as it is not forbidden, people do it
This leads me to believe that in most (though perhaps not all) cases people are probably posting short comments. Nothing wrong with that sometimes, but overall it's the sort of thing HN tries to discourage, which isn't a bad thing IMHO.
Right; it took me forever to realize that "dang" was "Dan G" and not just a word. Especially since HN usernames can have mixed case, so he could have picked "DanG" (which... I still would have probably read as a funnily-formatted word but it'd be more of a hint:]). Though for all I know he predates HN supporting uppercase in names, and stylistically I can totally see preferring lowercase.
That's indeed the rule, but only when the story has had significant attention (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
When a story hasn't had significant attention in the last year (or a bit longer), it's ok to repost a small number of times.
Past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Guidelines-breaking comments do frequently appear about China, but that is a function of geopolitical and media trends, not HN moderation. The way we moderate such comments has nothing to do with my/our personal views about China or any other country. If you stop and think about it and you know the HN guidelines well, this shouldn't be that hard to believe. The vast majority of these moderation calls are not borderline.
From a moderation perspective, everything in the above paragraph is obvious. From a user perspective, it's often impossible to communicate, because whenever someone has a strong feeling about $topic, their view about moderation is determined by their feeling about $topic. If they see us moderating something they agree with, they jump to the conclusion that we're secretly in cahoots with the opposing side. Of course the opposing side does the same thing.
Perhaps the purgatory state could expire after some fixed (weeks, months) cool-down period, I don't know. Just a suggestion.
Edit: Oh yeah, there has been that tiny collapse button for a while, I somehow never got into the habit of using that one and forget it is there. I wish there was a setting to use the words "up vote" "down vote" and "collapse" rather than needing to pixel hunt :/.
I don't mean that literally every comment I write is getting downvoted to below zero. Rather, I'll write something, it will accumulate a couple to several upvotes, and then, those upvotes all go away over the course of a few more hours, sometimes to be replaced by net downvotes.
The end result is that I actually have less karma now than I did a few weeks ago. And, I wouldn't particularly care about those fake internet points, if the loss of them didn't seemingly come with these weird, arbitrary-seeming restrictions like "you are posting too fast."
TBH, it's getting to the point where I'm about ready to abandon this account.
If you want the rate limit turned off, we'd be happy to do that as long as we have reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future. I'm sorry for the annoyance but we have to do what we can to prevent this place from burning itself to a crisp, and if you want to post without being throttled then we need your help with that.
Rather than prostrate myself before the mod team, only to end up having this happen again, I'd honestly rather flush this account down the toilet, go grab a VPN and start again. If nothing else, I'm guessing that would get rid of the random, mass downvoting that's driving me crazy, and it would save us both some time.