

Why is my account -2?  No explanation? - joccam

Why is my account -2?  No explanation?<p>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?<p>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.<p>Not a great introduction to your service.  The news is good, but the commenting and moderating seems broken and unaccountable.<p>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.<p>By the way, this experience is the first I've had of this kind on the sites I frequent.  FYI.
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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
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
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
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
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
HNSeach anouncement: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619736> (341 points
by pg 275 days ago, 127 comments)

