I was not hellbanned - where everything I posted was instantly dead.
To be honest the only thing I'm sure of is that I was slowbanned. I timed page loads 10 times with the slowbanned account and they averaged about 11 seconds. Then page loads with not being logged in averaged about 1 second. Then page loads with a new account averaged about 1 second as well.
The junky thing is that the account was almost 7 months old and had 3,324 positive karma but I guess I said something that ticked someone off:
There isn't anything in that account's immediate history that looks like grounds for bannination, on the contrary. Are you sure it's a slowban, not some technical problem? I'd try to email the admins to find out more.
I'm pretty confident it's a slowban. Logging in with this account again, I go from instant page loads to 12 second page loads - only on HN of course.
After re-reading the terms of use of the site, I emailed pg on 11/22 stating that I believed I was slowbanned and that I didn't believe I had violated any terms of use. I hadn't spammed ever (I have nothing to sell), I don't participate in flame wars. I didn't get a response so I emailed him again on 11/27 just saying it's clear I was slowbanned and that it would be nice to know why but that I guess that's not going to happen. I figure there are a few possibilities:
1. I said one thing one time that rubbed someone the wrong way
2. An admin thought it would be funny to give someone who uses the username 300bps a slowban thereby effectively causing their web experience to be equivalent to a 300 bps modem
Again, I don't know what HN uses slowbans for, but my guess would be it's for technical reasons rather than content. It's an interesting issue that got me googling. There doesn't seem to be a real point of contact where people can appeal account moderations on HN. It seems to me that emailing pg doesn't scale very well, which might be the reason why you didn't get an answer.
And I found this, somewhat self-absorbed, blog entry by Michael O. Church about pretty much the same thing you're describing:
I think it's weird that people think HN admins, or specifically pg, owe them an apology - but it does show how serious people are taking their accounts. On the flip side it's not at all clear how seriously HN takes its more seasoned users. All things being equal, I trust the admins to statistically do the right thing because there are probably a lot of hidden variables we're not aware of.
However, there seem to be a lot of young and/or low-karma accounts who do just fine while being hostile, personal, and all-around detrimental. Maybe there is an algorithmic problem that causes more seasoned accounts to accrue "flag debt" or whatever without a sufficient method of decaying those flags.
When you're first banned in any way it's pretty easy to get upset about it. Stating that someone owes you an apology is silly, but I know from personal experience that it is not a great feeling.
The thing that I remind myself of though is that if HN didn't have counterintuitive rules that it would likely be more like reddit which I think would be a bad thing.
To be honest the only thing I'm sure of is that I was slowbanned. I timed page loads 10 times with the slowbanned account and they averaged about 11 seconds. Then page loads with not being logged in averaged about 1 second. Then page loads with a new account averaged about 1 second as well.
The junky thing is that the account was almost 7 months old and had 3,324 positive karma but I guess I said something that ticked someone off:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=300bps