Can someone explain why I'm "hellbanned?" | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain why I'm "hellbanned?"

16 pointswrongfulban5 comments

This is honestly absurd. I would like to be able to post under my original username again.

I think someone strongly disagreed with a comment of mine so they clicked "flag" and from then on all of my comments/submissions have become immediately dead. Sounds like a flawed system to me. If this isn't resolved, I may have to take advantage of it and start "hellbanning" everyone I disagree with in the future.

For the record, I've e-mailed pg. And a short reply from naner indicates he prefers the guilty until proven innocent method; i.e., reading my comments/submissions should prove that 99% of my posts are not hateful/spammy.

Put yourself in my shoes. How would you like it if for the past 20 days you thought your comments counted but in fact they're all hidden along with any possible future submissions?

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TimothyBurgess

View on HN

I fear you're digging yourself deeper by creating multiple new accounts and threatening to sabotage the site. No, it's not great that you've wasted your time. And some of your comments were excellent: there's some good technical insight, and there was at least one pre-ban comment on music that I voted up.

On the other hand, there are a couple of your dead comments that I would have flagged had they been visible:

'And this this why the majority of people on HN (and other elitist "communities") are shortsighted, closed minded, and generally mildly retarded.'

'Don't get me wrong, brawn+brains wins over just brains (take me for example ;D) and women might even say that's what they want - but any man with experience knows that at least 90% of the time what comes out of a woman's mouth isn't entirely the truth and has a hidden agenda behind it.'

This is not a mode of discourse that is acceptable here. It may work fine for you in real life and other places you frequent on the internet, but it's not fine here. Accepting it here will change the community in a way that I don't want to see it change. This article might offer insight into this approach: http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2011/04/civility-starts-wi...

Writing to Paul is a good start, but rather than presuming the system is broken, you might consider instead whether it's worth changing your behavior to fit in here, or whether somewhere else might be a better fit. Whether you agree with it or not, at least consider that the ban might be working as intended. His site, his rules, all that.

Are you the same person as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2505144 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2506130 by any chance? Both of those refer to a post where the user "defended PHP as a language where it was being bashed," and the first comment to be killed in TimothyBurgess's comment history is the same thing.

If so: you've posted about this three times in the last day. Stop, relax, and take a break. Wait until PG responds. He might sort it all out, or he might not, but complaining so much is not going to increase his opinion of you.

If not: Relax. Wait until PG responds before you start posting threads complaining about it (or, you know, don't post threads complaining about it. If your original account gets reinstated, great; if not, start a new one and calm down).

Also, a sidenote: from one of your comments as TimothyBurgess (item?id=2470350): "the majority of people on HN (and other elitist "communities") are shortsighted, closed minded, and generally mildly retarded." While that doesn't appear to be the cause of your account being killed, based on the chronology, what did you expect to happen?

That last comment you've pointed out was partially referring to the PHP haters and their bandwagon jumping. Thanks for taking it out of context to make it look worse than it was!

complaining so much is not going to increase his opinion of you.

You really think he's gonna read all of my posts on the matter? He won't. The idea is to get his attention just once so he can fix it, and leaving it alone definitely isn't going to make that happen.

It's not much better in context, though (I will admit that I did not look at the context, however). You could just have easily made the same point by saying "the insular nature of many communities and focus on karma (or whatever arbitrary measurement is used) can lead to ignoring arguments despite the validity and usefulness of those arguments" without insulting anyone.

And yes, he won't read all your posts. However, these posts are not helping in catching his attention (at least not compared to emailing him, which is an actual effective thing to do).

I'm guessing it was this comment:

"I'll probably get downvoted like mad for saying this but I still think it's hilarious that a company valued at $65+ billion uses PHP as the base language for their software (granted, certain measures are taken to increase efficiency) and all of you bandwagon jumping hipsters still hate on it. You can spout reasons why you're butthurt by PHP and it's robustness (in the form of misguided and shortsighted attacks comparing features of other languages) all you want, but it doesn't take away from the fact that a wide range of people can understand and implement PHP. And if you think that's a bad thing, I think we've found the underlying source of your angst towards the language: with PHP, you don't feel like you're part of an exclusive nerd club."

It's not bad enough to get banned if you ask me, but I've seen this happen before. I disagree with the "silent" banning policy, since it seems to waste the time of legitimate users while not providing that much benefit in the anti-spam department.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com