Either I missed it or it does not mention "posting too fast" feature, which is very annoying, because if you commented on something you can be restricted from commenting on another, unrelated topic.
It's extremely annoying. It doesn't give you any indication how you triggered it, nor does it give you any indication how long you need to wait until you can post normally again.
What's more, since the people who wrote the code for this feature are pretty smart, it's hard to believe these two things are oversights.
Edit: In response to a now deleted comment on how this feature is intended to be annoying, because your contribution was deemed harmful, but not ban-worthy, I say this:
I disagree that this approach is correct in that case. If you want to discourage certain behavior, then, on a site such as HN, you should treat your users as adults and tell them what you don't want them to do. Simply locking them out for an unknown amount of time, for unknown reasons, is just going to drive them away. This is just basic operant conditioning. Presumably, driving the user away entirely is not the result one wants a significant portion of the time.
Interestingly, I have never hit this. I heard about it before, and I have sometimes posted a fair number of comments over a fairly short amount of time too, but somehow I've never hit any limit on this.
This leads me to believe that in most (though perhaps not all) cases people are probably posting short comments. Nothing wrong with that sometimes, but overall it's the sort of thing HN tries to discourage, which isn't a bad thing IMHO.
I first experienced it a few weeks ago, coincidentally after I started experiencing some kind of weird, mass downvoting of basically every comment I write. For some reason, this mass downvoting is continuing.
I don't mean that literally every comment I write is getting downvoted to below zero. Rather, I'll write something, it will accumulate a couple to several upvotes, and then, those upvotes all go away over the course of a few more hours, sometimes to be replaced by net downvotes.
The end result is that I actually have less karma now than I did a few weeks ago. And, I wouldn't particularly care about those fake internet points, if the loss of them didn't seemingly come with these weird, arbitrary-seeming restrictions like "you are posting too fast."
TBH, it's getting to the point where I'm about ready to abandon this account.
If you want the rate limit turned off, we'd be happy to do that as long as we have reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future. I'm sorry for the annoyance but we have to do what we can to prevent this place from burning itself to a crisp, and if you want to post without being throttled then we need your help with that.
I can't provide you with that assurance without more specific information as to what exactly I've done wrong. You've removed the punishment so far from the act being punished, then hidden it behind a cryptic error message, so that I have no idea what not to do in the future.
Rather than prostrate myself before the mod team, only to end up having this happen again, I'd honestly rather flush this account down the toilet, go grab a VPN and start again. If nothing else, I'm guessing that would get rid of the random, mass downvoting that's driving me crazy, and it would save us both some time.
