zlacker

> Re the second bit: there aren't any accounts whose upvotes count for more, but if accounts upvote too many bad* comments and/or get involved in voting rings, we sometimes make their votes not count anymore.

Thanks for confirming this. There was some speculation last year about partial shadow bans for voting,* and it's good to hear an authoritative answer.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317059

When this happens to an HN account, is it permanent or can it be reversed if the account stops upvoting "bad" comments? If it's permanent, affected users would like to know. Evaluating comments and determining whether they should be voted on can take a long time, and the affected users could save a lot of time if they knew that their votes would never count again.

>>common+(OP)
It's not permanent in the sense that we remove the penalty when we see that the user has shifted their behavior. That could be either because someone emails us or because we (randomly) take a look at the situation and change things.

I know that's problematic because it depends on us seeing things and manually doing them. I'd love to automate it—not just because it would be fairer but because it would be less work for us! But I don't know how to write code to do that.