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Comment by DanielStraight | Hacker News Reader

Another idea for preventing decay / devolution:

Membership is by invite only. Whenever someone gets banned (for any reason), the person who invited them gets banned (recursively).

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> Whenever someone gets banned (for any reason), the person who invited them gets banned (recursively).

If I understand your "(recursively)" part correctly, this could make for a really interesting mass-shedding of users the first time anyone was banned. Like watching Filezilla delete a directory structure ...

Well it would only go up the tree of invitation, not sideways. The most members that could be banned at one time would be the depth of the tree. If A invites B, who invites C, who invites D, and that's as deep as any chain of invitation goes, then at most 4 people could be banned at one time.

I'm not certain how to deal with the problem of initial members / founders. Surely the founder would not set up the system so they would be banned the first time someone was banned. It seems there would need to be a set of unbannables, including the founder.

I suppose you would need to handle the detached leaves of the tree too. This brings the unbannables back into play. So if A was an unbannable and had invited B, B had invited C1 and C2 and C3, C1 had invited D and D got banned, C1 and B would also be banned, and C2 and C3 would be considered invited by A.

I think this is getting far too complicated to be practical.

Reminds of Zed Shaw's Utu (AFAIK inactive). That concept had recursive hate, and real names, if I remember correctly.

But honestly, that leads to very complicated systems, lots of angry banned people, … anonymity, in moderation, is good.

Maybe instead you have to be sponsored by somebody in order to view posts, but instead of banning people outright, let the sponsor's karma/reputation be affected by the people he sponsors. That way someone who creates a lot of value to the community can mentor someone who is not currently providing a lot of value, and help them understand the community or decide it isn't for them. Then if the relationship isn't working out the sponsor can stop sponsoring them and the person will have to look for a new sponsor if they want to do anything but view the stories and discussion, but the community will be kept fairly intact, except for the people the system is still trying to figure out or vice versa.

I think it's important to distinguish between being an asshole on the internet and being a poor judge of character.

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