Ask HN: Why was a comment I made killed?

I would applaud any effort to make comment-killing and user-banning a more transparent process on HN. You don't know it happens when it happens, it's often for a shaky reason, and there is no place to discuss it other than emailing PG (which just seems wasteful, a feeling that was reinforced by PG's very curt tone throughout).

When seeking assistance for a hellban of my very own, I was emailed by several helpful HN power users, all giving basically the same opinion -- "The HN moderation is capricious and deaf", in one user's words. That's an uncomfortable assessment from regular site contributors.

I'm not sure. This is my third user account. Coming from reddit and slashdot, I had an abrasive posting style, which sometimes would generate hundreds of upmods for my posts, and sometimes would generate dozens of downmods.

Maybe this is purely me, but having a month or two of my posts going down the black hole 1. saved people from my vitriol and 2. forced me to think about why it happend.

Now, I think there are too many people that will downmod a comment because they disagree with it, or because it responds to one of their comments in an unflattering (but appropriately toned) way. If this happens to you early on you get put in the kill list.

You also get kill-listed if you upmod a killed account too much, which is to prevent shill accounts I suppose.

The real way to tell, however, is that whenever you are logged in every page view takes 10 seconds or more to load.

Overall I think that all these shinanigans are pretty effective at knocking down the number of people who are just angry and bringing that anger to the site. They might be perfectly smart people, but there are plenty of smart people in the world, and people coming here to rage are such a huge negative that it is best if they are eliminated from the site, even if there are occationally people who get kill-listed 'unfairly'.

This is a BBS, not a criminal court. If you feel it is unwarranted you are banned from posting to a Bulletin board, my suggestion at that point would be to create another account and proceed rocking out from there. If you can't get over the injustice of being slighted by an automated system on a discussion board, then your priorities are incredibly retarded, and probably you should reflect on your life and figure out why? I should say that this isn't meant to be directed at anyone in particular, except maybe to me circa 2006.

http://enjoys.it/hn/outcast.html

After I asked in #startups if someone would be so kind to submit it, I was suggested to mail to pg's email address. I did and received a dry "Ok, I unbanned you.".

"Can you please revert that? And give me a reason why I am not considered worthy using HN anymore?"

You got the first part. Did you ever get an answer to the second part?

> That's an uncomfortable assessment from regular site contributors.

First, I agree with you that a more transparent process would be a positive thing.

Second, I'd like to highlight that this is by far the finest community I've ever been a part of for a long term period. I've seen other communities good for six months to a year before coming somewhat unglued, and Hacker News hasn't done that in the two years or so I've been here. So I agree with you, but also want to take a moment to thank the moderators for what is largely a thankless job, and for what they're largely doing incredible work with.

So, agree that improvements can be made, and still - a massive amount of gratitude from me. Actually, if there's any HN mods in whatever city I'm in at any given time, shoot me an email and lunch is on me. Taipei right now, seriously, you guys are amazing and thanks.

That's a well-reasoned reply. I too appreciate the tone of this site and given the fact that there are hundreds of non-moderated places I can go and say whatever I want to online, I'm ok with HN being tightly moderated.

It seems that some people who have had their early comments downmodded (for an unpopular opinion, like not hating Perl) get the rest of their comments auto-killed. It happened to a friend of mine, who wanted to use HN but has since moved on to other sites, since he can't post anything anyone else can read. (I browse with showdead on, so I can see the comments, but I can't reply or upvote, so...)

It seems like the idea is to encourage the usual social-news-site groupthink, even though pg has publicly stated that he wants to avoid this. (The spaghetti-code that is news.arc is probably a contributing factor, but I digress...)

How could 'not hating Perl' be an unpopular opinion ;)

Anyway, I fully agree that having your comments auto-killed just for saying what you think - no matter how unpopular - should never happen.

Is it possible that there is some kind of low threshold for your karma after which all your comments get killed?

Because I'm fairly sure that I have said some pretty unpopular stuff here and afaik I am not dead.

Maybe it's not too smart to start antagonizing people right off the bat, before you have sufficient 'karma cushion' to survive a drive-by downmod or two.

How about only displaying the downmod button after you've answered someone?

My guess is that there's some code that says "if the first N comments all get voted negatively, it's probably just a spammer, kill it".

Yes; someone posted the relevant bit of news.arc a few days ago. There is also apparently an evil bit that also controls the heuristic, IIRC.

It is weird that the "new" social news sites mess up moderation so badly. Slashdot solved this years ago; I never see spam on Slashdot. Nor do I see people being auto-killed there.

Slashdot has spam but only in the firehose.

View the firehose at 'black' level and you'll see more spam than on hn, just a random sample:

http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=8811130&a...

The firehose is equivalent to the HN 'new' page.

If you only look at the homepage on HN you will never see spam.

Not really all that weird: it's been a fairly small site for a while, and wasn't built to grow, so pg has most likely just done the minimum to make it work for him, rather than investing significant time in it.

One of the admins accidentally marked a site as a spam site and you later submitted something from it, after which your account was briefly banned.

This post, however, was killed because we can't have people submitting top level posts every time they want to complain about something being killed. If you have a question pertaining to your specific account, email us (info@ycombinator.com).

This only a guess, but your comment may have been picked up by pg's bayesian spam filter. It seems like a word based spam filter may have mistaken your comment for some sort of scam telling people to "send payment" to a "business account" for details follow the link.

The only thing I can think of is that it got flagged by several users for some reason (though what that might be I cant imagine). I cant see how an editor would kill it.

Or. Potentially a spam filter caught it; that would explain the behaviour (of appearing to you but not to others)

There was a link to amazon.com, so the most sensible explanation would be spam filter. Let me try that now:

https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/about?nodeId=6022#fees

You can mail pg and ask him. Recently there have been a few stories on HN from users saying 'why is X happening to me' where X is votes not counting, stories being flagged, comments being deleted.

TBH I'm just not interested. If you've got a problem with something that's happened to you ask pg. Don't come whining to the group.

And the user who is secretly emailing people about comments that have been deleted doesn't seem helpful either. They are working in a behind-the-scenes manner that could easily end up being counterproductive as some 'anti-HN' group gets formed by it.

I think for many people the barrier to mailing PG is perceived to be considerably higher than to ask the community.

I'm sure that's true but these posts come across as passive-aggressive. Rather than going direct to the person who could actually address the issue the submitters complain to the community.

It is almost always best to try to address problems with the people you are having a problem with.

it's not like there is a 'contact the admin' link anywhere, the only way to find out is to ask others.

Don't forget that to mail some millionaire that also happens to run a forum is something that people will simply perceive as intimidating. If there would be a documented route to 'message the admin' then I think these threads would vanish.

I found his address through other means; it's not particularly hard - but as you say it is a higher barrier than submitting a thread.

One thing I used to like about HN was how stuff like this just got genuine helpful responses and there was no worry about them existing.

I am guessing the number of people about here now means there are more of the threads, more make the front page and so forth (whereas before they were mostly the domain of the "new" page crowd)

The simplest - and imnsho best - solution to all this friction is a simple drop down on the submit page, four sections: hacking, startups, meta and other.

Four links at the top, homepage will only take entries from hacking and startups, label your content wrong and you lose 50 karma points.

You are undoubtedly right, I guess I assumed that HN was filled with people who think they've got a God-given right to just email millionaires.

It's not obvious to an outsider that "Hacker News" is Paul Graham's playground and that he is the one "you are having a problem with". As an outsider, I would have assumed as the poster did, that the community would be supportive in resolving what seems to be a reputation issue. But it's not plain that it's a reputation issue, as it seems (to me) that HN-based reputation doesn't map to relationships the same way it does in Real Life; the written rules are not all of the rules.

I do believe that you should be careful about asking stupid questions in public. But I don't think this was unexpected.

More to the point: I don't think it's obvious that HN is relatively unimportant.

There are people here now who are here primarily for what passes for intelligent discussion these days -- myself among them. But, that doesn't quite match this site's original intended purpose, which was to become a point of community for potential YCombinator applicants.

So, if someone gets banned by mistake, or if there's some imbalance or some feature or tweak that HN maybe should have ... as long as it isn't negatively impacting YCombinator applications, then it really isn't worth a terrible amount of pg's time or attention.

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. There is basically an existential conflict between the stated goals of YC in running HN, and the expectations of the community that has formed. A bit of collateral damage here and there does not impact YC's goals at all, as you have said, although it does rattle the community.

It's an interesting situation - I don't blame PG or YC for their occasional failings. I expect they are surprised, and perhaps not in a 100% comfortable way, at the way the community, and expectations, have grown. Arguably HN is now too large to fulfil its purported function of screening YC applicants prior to interview.

That said, doesn't matter if you wanted the kid - once it's in your arms and screaming, a kid you have. I hope that PG is at least considering anointing some more moderators - "community selected" would be best - to take up the mantle when he doesn't have the time or inclination to take an in-depth interest in things. I certainly have some people in mind that I would gladly support being moderators, and I think they would gladly accept.

The HN story is quite fascinating, really. It's still the best we've got, seemingly completely by accident. Quite inspirational.

If the system of moderation is broken (Which it seems likely to be lately), it's of interest to the community as a whole IMHO.

More importantly, these kinds of meta-threads allow the community to comment on these types of topics. Things that you might think are only happening to you, or that you only care about, turn out to have a rather large number of users with the same problem.

update: To respond to some of the comments here I must first say that my question has no intended malice. I was not aware that comments were auto-filtered which some posts mentioned and certainly the filters could be geared towards comments that mention payments, bank accounts and credit cards. I had thought the only spam detection system in place was the 'flag' feature.

As long as there are no repercussions for being detected by the filters and my HN account stays in good standing there is no need to for me to be concerned.

To the comments which suggested that this is not HN material and should have been addressed privately, I say that I did not suspect this post would receive as much attention as it did. I expected it to receive some sparse upvotes and an answer along the lines of "sensitive spam filter sometimes kills legitimate posts, known problem, nothing to be worried about". I did not want to clog up an admin's inbox querying it. I also wanted to check whether I was able to post.

Indeed. I commented on something and only discovered accidentally that my comment could only be seen be me, which is a horrible way for things to work. Your comment is hidden and you have no idea. I emailed the contact email (cant remember the address) and never got an answer. It really made me never want to comment again and seemed totally capricious.

I think the "personal hell" is a feature rather than a bug. Very, very nasty to be inside it, but very effective as punishment.

You're correct ... but only if it's absolutely fair ... to the point that if I were PG, I'd require a human being's double check before dropping the hammer (ADDED: at least, if the account has been open for very long).

To echo hank777, the very fact that HN has this well known silent technique of "hellbanning" (new term to me) is going to drastically change my posture towards contributing.

(Just how, I can't say yet (too early in the morning), but it will be significant. I know from my behavior in other forums after I learned that they do this (e.g. GrokLaw) that I won't be making many more contributions, for this drastically changes the risk/reward ratio.)

I had an account banned, you can clearly see why

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=skwiddor

i can't

Turn on 'show dead' in your profile.

that's my point

two admittedly poor taste posts, one a response to the other being modded down and I'm out

and they didn't tell me for two weeks but they let me dead post so no mods and no responses.

is there a downmod threshold? once you reach it your banned? i've had a few posts down graded, and still no ban...is there a document somewhere someone can point me to?

Why are you asking the community this question? Why not just ask an admin like you would on any other forum or irc network? Why do people think that this is something other HNers need to know about?

[edit: this is a genuine question to establish a motive that might stop me flagging this and other content, this post is worthless clutter for all I can see]

[edit2: anyone care to explain their downvotes?]

This is something other HNers need to know about. The policy and process around killing comments is utterly mysterious and apparently capricious. As a community, we should have a clear understanding of:

a) What comments will be killed; and

b) What process will be followed to determine whether a comment is killed.

Sorry, but security through obscurity is no excuse for not making this stuff transparent.

What are you talking about, this isn't a question of security.

It's a metaphor. The excuse I keep hearing is that if we learn how HN filters spam, it will enable spammers to game the system.

Frankly, I don't care so much about the internal mechanisms used to kill posts. I just want to understand the policy; I have the showdead flag on and at least a quarter of the time, I can't for the life of me figure out why a comment was killed. That lack of transparency makes me uncomfortable.

That's PG's own view of how this works, we're not even supposed to tell people to stop bothering with their posts because they have been banned.

I can see the rationale for it at some level but I really doubt that it has much effect, spammers are pretty good at monitoring the effect of their actions.

It also makes me wonder who the mysterious 'you've been banned' emailer is.

I don't think the lack-of-telling-people-to-not-bother-posting is about spam, it's about ordinary internet rats who would just reregister and continue making terrible posts.

It also makes me wonder who the mysterious 'you've been banned' emailer is.

What? I've never heard about this. (Edit: Oh, I glossed over half the threadstarter's text.)

> I don't think the lack-of-telling-people-to-not-bother-posting is about spam, it's about ordinary internet rats who would just reregister and continue making terrible posts.

That's very well possible.

(edit: I doubt someone would go out of their way to alert a troll to being banned though)

> What? I've never heard about this.

You would have if you read the posting at the top of the page ;)

It is possible for someone to make poor posts in the beginning and improve their post content when they realize their role within the community. Many new visitors to HN are likely to encounter this by simply making a one-line 'witty' comment that people dislike. When that gets downvoted, they may tend to lean towards more informative and relevant posts after learning their lesson.

No, it isn't, it's something particular HNers like to complain about due to some over zealous sense of free speech or something like that. Why could this not have been handled silently through an admin, like you would anywhere else where this might happen?

The problem is that HN has turned into a monster of a forum, and to know everything that goes on behind the scenes to keep it functioning and to set up guidelines that navigate this perfectly is utopian. False positives and accidents happen, admins welcome reports of these, I don't get what the community gets out of them, though.

pg is the admin; at a guess queries like this would usually take a while to get a response.

Someone here would probably be able to answer the question faster.

I don't see how this differs from asking for advice on IRC when you have failed to take even the most cursory of glances at Google to track down the solution yourself. This is a golden rule of IRC support. Other than taking a little more time, the situation is exactly the same.

AFAIK this hasn't been answered before (that's from 30s on searchyc).

We were discussing emailing pg a short while ago and the consensus then seemed to be "only if it's really important".

Particularly because things like this are not always the result of pg personally moderating or killing accounts. Many times it's due to user abuse. AFAIK, HN grants different levels of power to users based on their karma. When I first joined, I couldn't downvote, and could only comment a couple times a day.

Who's to say that the guys on here http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders don't have some kind of uber-user power because of their high karma score?

We've already established in a number of threads over the past few months that some of these folks (to be left unnamed) have invested remarkable effort into attaining these scores and think very highly of themselves and don't feel the need to answer to anyone for their otherwise abusive behavior (like hitting the downvote cap %, or flagging users they don't like etc.).

More interesting is that the community discussion around those guys' behavior also showed interesting patterns in the way HN works. Eventually pg shows up and says something like "yeah well, if your karma is above 10k, and you have a 30% upvote surplus, and it's a thursday, you can kill user accounts, but only 2 a year, unless their name starts with a t,s,kh, or an odd number." and then somebody posts the relevant arc source for that.

We all then walk away scratching our heads as to why that's something built into the site, but we have no internal mail system or simple way of contacting the admins.

Might have something to do with the fact that there is no obvious way to contact an 'admin', like on any other forum or irc network. Perhaps except the 'any other forum or irc network' part.

The only ways of contacting available on this site are info@ycombinator.com (which I never got a reply on with a banning problem, I waited 3 weeks) and submitting a story.

Anything else is just not there unless you know about it by other means.