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.<p>Lobste.rs doesn't allow signups without invitation. What if you don't know personally someone who is a user there to invite you?<p>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.<p>Do these policies of online forums make you feel excluded? Do you wish these sites ran differently? How would your ideal online forum run?
> 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.<p>Firstly is that actually true? I feel like I've seen any number of interesting posts from brand new accounts.<p>Secondly, if you have "spent weeks building" something it will not kill you to wait for five days to tell us about it.<p>> This doesn't let you share something important with many people anonymously and quickly.<p>Nothing springs to mind that is that important that:<p>• It can't wait a week or two<p>• Would be of no interest to conventional news organisations<p>What specifically did you have in mind?<p>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."
The problem is, without these measures forums quickly get overrun by spam.<p>So they use reputation / points / karma / invitations as a proxy for trust.<p>You don't have the right to demand people's attention. You have to earn that.
> 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.<p>I don't think that is automatically true, I've seen many new accounts with a single post/comment.<p>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?
five days is nothing.<p>invitations are for hype as much as for filtering. diminishing returns. eventually invites get to those “you” didn’t want to invite.<p>there are subreddits to help you boost karma to get over the karma hump. ten days is still basically nothing.<p>these policies help deter bad actors. but not well. bad actors can plan ahead.<p>feel excluded? no.<p>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.