Ask HN: How do I know if I am shadow banned on HN?

5 points by gpttpg ↗ HN
Has anyone experienced this before? Are there some restrictions on new accounts?

5 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 15.9 ms ] thread
What a perfect example of ambiguous question :)
How would you resolve it? :)
Disambiguation: restate the question back to the person in your own -- but different words -- to verify you've grasped the essence of their question (or statement if it's not a question). The classic "So what you're saying is..." would be the formula.
in this case (as in most) the perfect way to resolve it — get down from the level of meaningless abstractions to concrete specific cases and examples

What exactly do you want to ask about? What is the specific ambiguity you faced recently that made ask the question?

Write all the possibilities, weigh them down, and get interested parties to understand them.

To finalize, create the urgency for a decision to be struck. "We need to choose". If a compromise can't be reached, authority needs to be used. Make sure all parties know why that decision was made (nobody could agree at it so that we will try X.)

Articles, etc, will always carry ambiguity, you can be as precise as you want, but if somebody has different cultural contexts or just wants to make you sound wrong, they'll fail to do it, and that's part of dealing with ambiguity, there's no way to precisely be sure that every party is aligned.