Take this thread as an example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49818698
The OP has a new account but all his replies are within the guidelines.
Here's another account with a dead comment in that thread. Most of their comments, while brief, seem perfectly reasonable. The account is 2 years old but most comments are dead https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=josefritzishere
In this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49574167) all of this user's (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=backlava12) comments were marked as dead. The user has an established account and all comments seemed within guidelines.
Has anyone else noticed this more recently? Is it perhaps a result of trying to identify AI-bot accounts?
The second was banned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630011
The third got caught in a troll filter and, looking at the comment history, I think the software made the right call.
I think they might have tuned up the heuristics to suppress that kind of thing but that's not what is going on there... like these are real replies in a real conversation. I don't like it that I can't upvote or vouch for them.
Hat's off to the mod staff, things feel "alright" even with the current situation.
I think in my account got flagged because of three things
1. Age, it's a pretty recent account, I used to have another one that's like 8yo by now (if not more) but I lost access to that email (and I could've benefited from a username change, so I decided to create a new one)
2. I created this account using a VPN, I have a slight suspicion that it caused me to be soft-banned from the start, but I can't confirm
3. HN probably implemented more strict filtering due to the advance of LLMs
If I were to pinpoint on a exact cause I'd say it's more likely that 2 and 3 are contributing much more than 1