> Accounts with years of history, solid karma, and virtually no record of missteps are suddenly being throttled
We rate-limit accounts when we see them posting too many low-quality comments and/or getting involved in flamewars. Those are missteps.
> It appears that merely having a story flagged is enough to trigger these constraints.
That's definitely not the case.
> So, if these users weren't throttled before, what changed?
Nothing changed. The moderation practices around rate-limiting have been the same for many years.
> Are they simply falling victim to brigading?
No. "Brigading" implies groups of third-party users, and actions by such accounts have no effect on rate limits.
> And isn't it a striking irony that fresh accounts, even those with provocative names like "gulfofamerica," can comment freely while long-standing contributors are being throttled?
When people see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't, they frequently feel that the mods must secretly endorse it, but by far the likelier explanation is just that we didn't see it. HN has far too much content for us to read it all, and we can't moderate what we don't see. That might be regrettable but it's not a "striking irony", just a mundane limitation.
Btw, if you're asking about your own account, the problem is that you've been using HN primarily for political battle, which is not only (1) against the site guidelines and (2) the sort of thing we rate limit accounts for, but (3) is actually a line at which we ban accounts (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for lots of past explanations). You've also been breaking the site guidelines in other ways.
We rate-limit accounts when we see them posting too many low-quality comments and/or getting involved in flamewars. Those are missteps.
> It appears that merely having a story flagged is enough to trigger these constraints.
That's definitely not the case.
> So, if these users weren't throttled before, what changed?
Nothing changed. The moderation practices around rate-limiting have been the same for many years.
> Are they simply falling victim to brigading?
No. "Brigading" implies groups of third-party users, and actions by such accounts have no effect on rate limits.
> And isn't it a striking irony that fresh accounts, even those with provocative names like "gulfofamerica," can comment freely while long-standing contributors are being throttled?
When people see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't, they frequently feel that the mods must secretly endorse it, but by far the likelier explanation is just that we didn't see it. HN has far too much content for us to read it all, and we can't moderate what we don't see. That might be regrettable but it's not a "striking irony", just a mundane limitation.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
---
Btw, if you're asking about your own account, the problem is that you've been using HN primarily for political battle, which is not only (1) against the site guidelines and (2) the sort of thing we rate limit accounts for, but (3) is actually a line at which we ban accounts (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for lots of past explanations). You've also been breaking the site guidelines in other ways.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html