from Hacker News

Ask HN: Do you feel excluded from HN/Lobste.rs/Reddit?

by Lk7Of3vfJS2n on 7/16/23, 12:09 PM with 13 comments

HackerNews makes it hard to post anonymously. If you signup and try to post a lot of text or god forbid a Show HN you spent weeks building, it shadow bans you for at least five days. It forces you to wait before you can participate.

Lobste.rs doesn't allow signups without invitation. What if you don't know personally someone who is a user there to invite you?

Many Reddit channels don't let you post unless the account has 10-25 points of karma and is ten days old. This doesn't let you share something important with many people anonymously and quickly.

Do these policies of online forums make you feel excluded? Do you wish these sites ran differently? How would your ideal online forum run?

  • by dcminter on 7/16/23, 12:51 PM

    > If you signup and try to post a lot of text or god forbid a Show HN you spent weeks building, it shadow bans you for at least five days. It forces you to wait before you can participate.

    Firstly is that actually true? I feel like I've seen any number of interesting posts from brand new accounts.

    Secondly, if you have "spent weeks building" something it will not kill you to wait for five days to tell us about it.

    > This doesn't let you share something important with many people anonymously and quickly.

    Nothing springs to mind that is that important that:

    • It can't wait a week or two

    • Would be of no interest to conventional news organisations

    What specifically did you have in mind?

    Because at the end of the day, without clarification, this sounds a lot like "Spammer would like to know how avoid the spam filtering please."

  • by edent on 7/16/23, 12:23 PM

    The problem is, without these measures forums quickly get overrun by spam.

    So they use reputation / points / karma / invitations as a proxy for trust.

    You don't have the right to demand people's attention. You have to earn that.

  • by tredre3 on 7/16/23, 1:33 PM

    > HackerNews makes it hard to post anonymously. If you signup and try to post a lot of text or god forbid a Show HN you spent weeks building, it shadow bans you for at least five days. It forces you to wait before you can participate.

    I don't think that is automatically true, I've seen many new accounts with a single post/comment.

    Maybe what happens is that the threshold for your comment to be greyed out is probably lower for new accounts. Same for flagged post, maybe a single flag is enough to kill a submission by a new account?

  • by catchnear4321 on 7/16/23, 1:15 PM

    five days is nothing.

    invitations are for hype as much as for filtering. diminishing returns. eventually invites get to those “you” didn’t want to invite.

    there are subreddits to help you boost karma to get over the karma hump. ten days is still basically nothing.

    these policies help deter bad actors. but not well. bad actors can plan ahead.

    feel excluded? no.

    there is no ideal. there are only attempts to mitigate humanity’s negative impact. some work better than others. none work great. humans are stubborn.

  • by trexicong on 7/16/23, 1:59 PM

    I don't think this is true of HN. Here I am posting a comment from a brand new account. Can you see it?