

HN punishes bad users with slow page load times - shunned

I should know. I've been a bad boy. I was promoting my site a little to zealously with stuff that I thought was interesting but obviously for which I had a conflict of interest. After being down voted five points on one comment and losing 45 points from my karma (assumingly from a flag), I noticed <i>really</i> slow page load times. The punishment in my case seems to be a randomized 10 second delay. The fix? Get a new account. Karma lost, page speed regained, lesson learned.
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kstenerud
Are you sure? It sounds counterproductive to deliberately tie up a socket and
process with artificial delays since it would leave the server less able to
service other requests.

I had extremely slow page load times on HN for the past few weeks but since
the beginning of this week it's been fast & snappy.

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DanBC
Slowbans are not exotic -
([http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-
or-h...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-
hellban.html))

>A slowbanned user has delays forcibly introduced into every page they visit.
From their perspective, your site has just gotten terribly, horribly slow. And
stays that way. They can hardly disrupt the community when they're struggling
to get web pages to load. There's also science behind this one, because per
research from Google and Amazon, every page load delay directly reduces
participation. Get slow enough, for long enough, and a slowbanned user is
likely to seek out greener and speedier pastures elsewhere on the internet.

But yeah; this kind of thing could easily be placebo effect.

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kstenerud
So I could very well have been in a slowban all this time...

Which means that I shouldn't say anything controversial for fear that the
downvotes will lead to a slowban. If that's true, I'm liking HN less and less.

~~~
DanBC
I have no idea if HN uses slowbans or not.

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boobooboo
Could be worse : apparently my IP is banned for comments and submissions.

