> At the end of the day, it's just another form of censorship.

This is how I feel right now, since there doesn’t seem to be a good way to openly debate the policies (or dark patterns like shadow bans) once you become subject to actions taken under those policies. All you can do is appeal to the moderators by email. It’s something, but a private conversation isn’t the same as a community debate. And a community debate isn’t possible once you are silenced. I’m not sure what the right solution is.

In my case, someone called me a nitwit and my response to them was deemed engaging in a flamewar even though I was mostly just clarifying my earlier comment/stance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30255599). And then upon further investigation from the moderator, I apparently didn’t have the right mix of topics I post on and was deemed to be engaging in ideological battle. It seems arbitrary to me because here are the topics I see in my recent comments: Canada protest, climate change, Neil Young, biometric identity verification, a tool to contact representatives, the Olympics, MacBook Pros, Google Slides, GoFundMe (I had many comments on this one admittedly), search engine results, Delta airline policy, compensation trends, cars, Microsoft Teams, mathematics, Roku spyware, and rent increases.

So what is a well meaning user to do if they want to just engage on the stories most meaningful to them? Is it really a bad thing to post on topics that are controversial rather than straightforward? On the other hand, I am not sure what other community is better than HN, even if I dislike censorship. So maybe they’re doing something right and I’m on the wrong side of it after all.

Your comment caught my attention. I took a look.

You're right that the exchange you linked to wasn't banworthy. But that exchange wasn't the problem.

The fundamental problem is that you're not writing from a position of intellectual curiosity. But the real issue is that you're interfering with why people come to the site: to be entertained. Almost all moderation actions make sense when viewed through that lens, and it took many years to realize and accept this hard truth.

People mostly aren't here for some sort of enlightenment, or to save the world, or to have their minds changed about politics. When you post here, you're broadcasting to millions of people, and around 50k of them see and engage with the top comments on a thread.

That's the high level overview. Zooming back into your account, within the last week you've posted almost entirely on political topics. That's not necessarily a bad thing (but it's usually a bad sign). The issue is that you have to frame these topics in a very delicate, substantive (double underscores on "substantive") way.

In the "Florida governor to investigate GoFundMe" thread, you spawned ten different subthreads. In the future, when you sense a topic is making you want to talk this much, you should treat it as an alarm, and pay close attention. (This helped me break some old habits, and I hope it helps you when you do get unbanned.)

If you collapse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225484, you'll notice that there are 90 total comments underneath that tree. That's a flamewar. It also happens to be a political flamewar, which is the worst type for HN's goals.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30254810 has 24 comments. It's a flamewar; almost explicitly so:

> More importantly, Neil Young has shown himself to be for censorship and against the free exchange of ideas. His stance is fundamentally at odds with free societies that harbor enlightenment values.

These were the worst, but your comments are doing the equivalent of tossing around molotovs. It's no surprise that some of them start fires.

When you do this repeatedly, it's the moderation team's duty to ban you. Again, people come here primarily for entertainment. You need to internalize this in order to experience a meaningful long-term change in behavior.

I'm spending this much time talking with you because I sense that you're a thoughtful person. But when you care so much about politics, you need to channel those energies somewhere else. Twitter is a decent one; it's where I took refuge when I was banned. https://lobste.rs/ too, when you want to talk about technical topics. Their stories often overlap HN's, and the crew there has unique perspectives relative to HN's audience. I like them a lot.

If you're still not convinced... Remember that old cartoon Good Idea, Bad Idea? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9erKbsQW8C0&ab_channel=THEDU...

Here are some examples of what it would frame as a Bad Idea on HN:

- Picking a fight with Dan over moderation policies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225929

- Posting a comment saying Merriam Webster is among the worst dictionaries, because they're politically activist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225625

- Saying that GoFundMe's decision to pause donations to Canada truckers was due to government pressure, and calling it a "chilling and tyrannical suppression of the right to protest": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30200795

- Calling eviction bans an "unconstitutional seizure of private property": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30144862

I could go on and on, and I haven't even reached two weeks into your account history. But it's 3 am.

The trouble is, it doesn't matter whether you're correct about the things that you're saying. I might even agree with you that eviction bans are interfering with property rights. But when you frame it as an "unconstitutional seizure of private property," that's an entirely different matter. At that point, the war drums are banging, and you're the drummer.

Here's what I would recommend you do. First, internalize that if you're banned, no one will miss you. (They didn't miss me.)

Second, decide whether you wish to participate on HN. (I did.)

Third, read Dan's reply to you, ideally several times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30274971

Then read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(I just reviewed them myself, and learned that I was recently guilty of "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." So this is a good exercise.)

Once you've internalized that HN is for curious conversation, start trying to have some. I recommend you restrict yourself to technical topics. Do this for at least one week.

At the end of the week, email [email protected], link to those comments, and explain that you understand now that HN isn't meant for political flamewar and that you'll try (hard) not to fall back into your old habits.

If you follow this recipe to a T, there's a good chance you'll be unbanned and happily HN'ing within a month.

The truth is that you're lucky. You have a straightforward path towards becoming unbanned. Mine included not being able to post to the site at all, even while banned.

Good luck. If you'd like to talk more extensively about this, you're always welcome to DM me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theshawwn I'm happy to lend an ear and to keep you company while you're banned.

The key is to just find a topic that makes you happy, and talk a lot about that. Mine turned out to be ML. It's difficult (though not impossible) to damage HN by nerding out about ML. And frankly, I don't miss the days when I was trying to talk about heated topics. Perhaps in a year or two you'll feel the same way.