They're also shadow banning/silently disabling your votes, and they will not inform you about this. You think you're voting on stories or comments, but you aren't if they perceive your behavior as "upvote too many flamewar comments, culture-war/ideological battle comments, or otherwise low-quality comments for HN" and "if a user has a track record of upvoting comments that break the guidelines and/or downvoting good comments, or voting in ways that seem unfair – e.g., voting based on political side or personal acrimony, rather than on the objective merits of the comment itself".
This seems like an especially silly complaint on a site that is clear on the label about votes being just one of many signals deciding placement on pages and threads. We've known since 2008 that the HN experiment doesn't work if it runs off raw votes; you just get a front page full of memes.
If this were clearly public (like written in the rules) then maybe it wouldn't be worth mentioning. But if it isn't, it's good for people to know, so they understand how their voting habits can affect whether their votes count, right? That's why I mentioned it.
Perhaps you should acknowledge that your claim of them refusing to tell people about this is false.
That reply feels needlessly adversarial. I'm not claiming they "refuse to tell people", my point is that this isn't clearly documented in the public rules and, as far as I can tell, users aren't notified when it happens (nor is it something staff states proactively).
I only learned about it after I asked via a non-public channel, with evidence. Otherwise I wouldn't have known, and I suspect most users are unaware. What I cited in previous comment is also from a non-public conversations.
If I'm wrong and it's documented publicly in rules or users are notified when it happens to them, I'm happy to be corrected, link?