Even if you're a long time user with substantial karma and "show dead" enabled in your profile, there are times when you're still unable to see posts from some "hellbanned" users. With this said, even if I knew which SOPA thread you're talking about, and what user-name you were using, I might not be able to see said problematic posts. You are essentially asking me for blind speculation.

The best I can tell you from blind speculation is you probably let your emotions get the better of you in the discussion, others decided you were acting like an ass, and they flagged your comments. Since you admit to "feeling strongly" about the topic, you were most likely pushing your opinion, and hence, your agenda... --And others pushed back. The other thing to realize is, in highly political and divisive topics there are most likely groups/rings at work trying to suppress the most vocal (or acerbic) posters. As far as I know, there is no such thing as "perfect" ring detection since differentiating it from group-think would be very problematic. If you've read any of PG's code, or any of his coding books (OnLisp, ANSI Common Lisp), you'll agree he's pretty darn good at coding, but even for him, "perfect" ring detection is probably beyond feasible.

So, with blind speculation, you've got three possibilities:

1.) You added a bit too much spice to your comments.

2.) You were on the wrong side of a voting/flagging ring.

3.) You were on the wrong side of consensus / group-think (i.e. you have an uncommon and contentious opinion).

Just because you could see up-votes on your comments does not mean you can see the 'flags' they have received, so you're basing your evaluation on incomplete information.

The last possibility is clearly stated in the HN Guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

Sure, SOPA intersects with tech and hacking, and even PG himself got in on the action by taking a stand on it, but none the less, it's still politics. You pushed heavily on comparisons to Nazi Germany (see "Godwin's Law") and voiced strong advocacy of Ron Paul. You might want to note that one rather prolific HN poster described Ron Paul as a "Mendacious Kook," so your opinion is not universally accepted and promoting your opinion is essentially pushing a political agenda. The result, of course, is the same "Ron Paul Spam" problems seen on Reddit. This is not Reddit. Here on HN, there is no way to compartmentalize topics (i.e. "sub-reddits") to prevent political pressure over-load.

You may have been up-voted by those who share your political views, but you were also most likely flagged for voicing those views here. If you want to discuss general politics, HN is the wrong place to do it.

My hunch is that you've been banned twice for going political in a place were it's clearly against the guidelines.

And no, just because you see PG occasionally breaking his own guidelines does not give you, or anyone, license to turn this place into yet another political forum. Hacker (nee Startup) News is his party, and the rest of us are just guests here.

On the bright side, if you study both the NEWS.YC source code and posts made by PG regarding his modifications to the HN version, you'll notice he has a rather consistent habit of using time as a factor in a lot of his calculations. If you got yourself banned for some reason, the ban may or may not be permanent. I suggest that you give your old account another try in a couple of weeks. Though I'm too tired to dig up a reference for you, I do remember reading something about bans being time limited in much the same way that there's a timer to prevent/slow-down replies for the sake of preventing flame wars. I could be mistaken, but none the less, I'm remembering something about this.

Looking at your posts under the 'ldar15' account shows none of them currently marked as '[dead]' so it seems as if your ban timed-out. I don't have total recall, so until someone posts a link to a post by PG stating that not all bans are permanent, the only safe bet is to consider your un-banning as just a coincidence. ;)

For notes, there has been one, and only one, time when I was actually concerned about a down-vote I received. I was interacting directly with PG, and quickly got down-voted. Since my reply to him would show up in his "Threads" page, and the down-vote occurred so quickly, I was unnecessarily concerned the down-vote came from PG --the guy nice enough to provide this site to me any everyone else. In that case, I just sent PG a polite email to make sure I hadn't stepped on any toes. It wasn't him, and it wasn't a big deal to him, but contacting him privately was the most polite way I could think of handling it.

Lastly, there is a known degree of randomness in voting, and there are known problems with up/down link placement on some devices (particularly mobile devices with touch screens). Though I have had moments where I wondered, "Why (the expletive) am I being down-voted?" often, it's not as big of a deal as it seems. Sometimes I communicate poorly. Sometimes I fail to be perfectly clear. Sometimes I get things wrong. Sometimes I'm a bit too spicy in my replies. But sometimes, people just click the wrong button by mistake. It happens to everyone. Learning from mistakes is good, but being overly concerned about it is a waste of time.