Why is my account -2? No explanation?

[joccam]

Why is my account -2? No explanation?

I see -1 on a comment from 41 days ago. However, there's no explanation and no accountability --- no one's name is attached to the -1. Where does the other -1 come from?

Is the -1 mean-spirited, political, or out of sheer ignorance and closed-mindedness? Or is it misguided (un)"patriotism"? Without any explanation, there's really no way to tell. It smacks of nastiness.

Not a great introduction to your service. The news is good, but the commenting and moderating seems broken and unaccountable.

Not sure what to say. This is my introduction to HN and YCombinator (which gets a lot of buzz which piques my curiosity but) which seem piss poor at the moment.

By the way, this experience is the first I've had of this kind on the sites I frequent. FYI.

[kaolinite]

Something that saddened me a lot was on an old account. When I first created it I made a jokey comment which - in hindsight - I shouldn't have said (it dissed Apple a bit). As a result it was downvoted. Fair enough I guess.

Since then however I'd commented pretty well, IMO. In fact in 3 specific cases I'd posted helpful comments. One was to a young person asking for beta testers for his startup (I recommended BetaBait). Two others were bug reports, complete with OS information and browser information. Genuinely useful, I thought.

But then, after the last bug report I posted received no response however someone who put a lot less effort into their response (i.e. "It's not working for me" rather than "It's broken with this error in this browser on this OS with these addons installed") - got a response from the submitter.

That's when I realised my posts were hidden. I wouldn't have been bothered by a ban or a suspension or - hell - being told that my posts were being hidden. However having been tricked into wasting my time was quite upsetting.

Still, I'm back on a new account. Hopefully I won't get downvoted again but we'll see. The quality of news and discussion here is very high so even though I agree with joccam's points about the broken comments system, I will most likely keep coming back.

[joccam → kaolinite]

Thanks for enlightening me re: censorship of posts. The first version of my post included a paragraph raising the issue of censorship (since I could not find my comment with a page search). So I thought the -1 was hiding my comment Then I found the "More" button, and discovered my comment... at the very bottom. So I deleted that paragraph, so I wouldn't create a red herring of my own... and to be fair to HN.

However, with your observation, I suspect my comment is censored, but I just can't tell. I don't care enough at this point to verify it. (My next comment will explain why.)

[kaolinite → joccam]

I grew suspicious after my bug report comment was ignored in favour of one with less content, so I logged out and refreshed the page - there was no comment. A friend also viewed the page and again, no comment.

Another thing that HN does is slow down your page loads if you have negative karma. Pages can often take between 10-30 seconds to load.

[bdfh42]

Hi - maybe I can point you in the right direction.

You made 2 comments to a post about disrupting Hollywood. The first was very short and very likely to attract negative votes - HN likes a reasoned argument. But what you may ask of the second comment - well it is Political and politics per se are generally excluded from HN - just picking up one negative vote was pretty good - it could well have been flagged for deletion.

Come back with some well argued contributions on start-ups and software and you will be welcomed by all.

[joccam → bdfh42]

Thank you for the constructive and positive feedback --- breath of fresh air.

The politics red flag you raise seems appropriate for a technical site like this one (but the topic of the thread was lobbyists and politics). So, daring to defend my comments, they were on-topic for the copyright/lobbyists issue under discussion (and I don't think there really is room for a full disclosure explanation of the comments).

Perhaps I'll have something of value to say on more technical topics, but the anonymous "big brother" introduction was (and frankly still is) a bit chilling, especially considering this site isn't even mass media (AFAIK).

[bdfh42 → joccam]

Copyright issues might be seen as an "edge case" at HN if it were not for the fact that software is so intimately affected by copyright law.

On the "big brother" bit - I think you should understand that HN is not designed specifically to welcome newcomers who are outside the target audience. You are expected to find and read the rules and to work out how everything works - as an instance, there is no "search" facility - you are expected to know how to use Google to search this site.

Anyone who is not comfortable with this is probably not that interested or involved in the subject matter. If you are, then please join in and make a contribution.

[edit] Just noticed the "Search box at the bottom of the comment page - when did that arrive? See - I am just out of date.

[gus_massa → bdfh42]

HNSeach anouncement: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619736 (341 points by pg 275 days ago, 127 comments)

[joccam → bdfh42]

FYI, I'm very likely target audience --- at least, I've been on slashdot.org for years. Is that target audience enough?