Suspension, Ban or Hellban?
codinghorror.com
codinghorror.com
Not only do you become invisible to others but there is long sleep delay on pages.
My old "_ck_" account somehow got flagged that way for reasons I don't understand and cannot find anyone to undo (and still would please like it back if possible?)
I remember reading a science fiction story where the punishment for certain crimes was that you got a special tag which meant that everyone would simply ignore you and refuse to acknowledge your existence, for a year. You became "invisible". Other "invisible" people also had to ignore you, iirc, otherwise their sentence would be extended. It was painted quite vividly as an extremely cruel form of punishment.
Personally, I find it extremely distasteful, for the sake of not dealing with people complaining about being banned, to simply make them invisible.
We have no inherent right to participate here.
There is, I think, a large extent to which this community survives because it's not an open, transparent democracy.
I once thought it was completely terrible, but changed my mind after the losethos guy showed up — secret hellbanning is a great tactic against active trolls, whether they're intentional or clueless.
Unfortunately it and individual deletions are the sole metamoderation mechanism on Hacker News — they work abysmally for managing good-faith users having a bad day or combatting spam, and there's an order of magnitude more of that than there are trolls.
The worst part is that HN's hellbanning isn't secret — you can just turn [showdead] on, defeating the point (see the "king of the shitpile" problem: http://metatalk.metafilter.com/1786/LPP-wall-of-shame). You'll see plenty of spam on the /new page, but for almost every [dead] comment you see you'll be baffled as to what happened. Sometimes it's just a duplicate post, and occasionally for hellbanned users you can page back through their history of good but [dead] comments and find a brief fit that could have been disciplined easily with a week's time out or even a simple admonishment to stop.
What really concerns me is all the individually-deleted comments and hellbanned users I've seen where there's no context at all as to why they're [dead] — the only thing I can think of is that they were eaten by the news.arc grue.
I understand what you're saying, that pg has every right to publish or [dead] or /dev/null our posts as he sees fit — but that's no reason for him to be cruel and capricious.
HN is poorly metamoderated. Yep. But I don't buy the argument that HN is run by cruel or capricious people. I have criticisms of HN management, but those aren't among them.
So, given that, if you've got a small group of people you trust not to be random jerks about it, who are putting in the time to keep the site running and keep the community at least somewhat functional, I think it's better for everyone that stuff like banning isn't an open transparent process for all of us to get wrapped up in.
I think he sees the naughtiness that he prizes in founders in users here, and that leads him down the path to writing off everyone slightly combative as trolls
alas i find myself agreeing with tptacek in that, i have no idea how a democracy of this would work, or even that we have any right to demand such a thing..
opens safari and checks comment is visible..
and as long as i'm commenting, i support hellbanning as well. i haven't seen anybody mention the fact that pg does this as a part-time thing. he does not have time to hold everybody's hand, explain to them what they did wrong, and deal with the inevitable heaps of abuse. it is instead incumbent on every participant to figure out the mores and rules of this mini-society, and adhere to them.
The reason you use hellbanning is not because you don't want to deal with complaints, but to prevent people from simply making new accounts and coming back to troll more.
Does it completely prevent this? No, a very determined griefer can easily run a second account on a second IP and check to see if/when they've been hellbanned, or just make new accounts all the time on principle.
There's certainly collateral damage, and I can see the argument that cost/benefit is off. But it's not like the policy is set out of laziness.
But, of course, it's only a part of a larger system. Along with hellbans, we have downvotes, flags, comments from high-karma users showing up higher on the page, algorithms to detect voting rings and sockpuppets, and so on.
All of these things combine to make it very difficult to be an effective troll on HN. Trollish comments normally end up with poor visibility and therefore low engagement from other users, which essentially starves the trolls.
That story was "To See The Invisible Man" [1] by Robert Silverberg. There's apparently an adaptation in an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Is the problem that the community isn't telling the problem person that they're banned? There's a reason they don't: because by and large, when you tell someone they've been banned, they react (particularly in the heat of the moment) by throwing a temper tantrum with a new account. Again: why is it the obligation of the community to absorb that kind of abuse?
And therein lies my double bind: how does one balance the need for a civil community with the hacker's dislike of things done in the shadows? Are you happy with the idea that users are secretly banned all the time?
Failing to welcome the comments, well intentioned or otherwise, of someone who had to be explicitly driven out of a community is not a terrible thing to do.
Not all of those [dead] comments are actually from hellbanned users, are they?
How about, the ones who care enough to put contact info in their profiles, you can reach out to them and say "you may not have noticed but the HN admins seem to have banned you".
I have contacted dead accounts in the past, a problem is that it’s hard to get contact info.
Hellbanning spambots I can understand. Hellbanning people?
Only found out I was hellbanned when someone who had showdead on noticed that a (fairly long) technical comment I left on a bloom energy post was killed. The comment itself wasn't to blame, but a comment left a hundred days earlier which ended up in negative karma, and nuked my entire account.
Many of them were just too passionate about a particular issue one day. Quite a few seem to have done nothing untoward at all.
I don't really have a problem with that right up until the point where you wittingly waste someone's time because they previously wasted yours.
In asking that I'd be turning this into a discussion about deontology and I doubt anyone's interests are served thus.
However, I do take your point. It just happens that I also have a considerable problem with the ethics of reciprocal justice.
Besides, of course, the practical problems such as how do you buy food. Do you have to steal it? (Easy, as nobody "sees" you)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2473029
I'm disturbed by the idea that concealment is considered an appropriate response to social problems you don't know how to solve (I'm aware pg does it also).
And as far as the meta sites go, I've found meta.SO to be an echo chamber; ideas aren't voted up or down so much on how they contribute to the discussion (as it goes on HN), but on whether or not how much the cool clique agrees.
Then I started thinking about what was said, about this being "reality altering". Which I disagree with, if you are not good at socializing, annoying even, no one is going to want you to be involved in conversations, or participate in activities with you. Much like ratings/web hits, if people don't like you or what you have to say, you effectively get the silent treatment, or are completely ignored or worse. If you do have relevant things to say, and are socially well behaved, people aren't going to ignore you, and will want you to participate in their activities, because you have something to offer, and its in their best interest to let you participate. That is of course assuming they don't have some prior misconception about you, because of race, sex, jealously or other social failures on their own parts. They will accept you in instead of doing all those things that they do to try and give you the hint to "go away" like ignoring you, not telling you about social gatherings, or whatever. This is all very natural, and mimics the real world quite well.
"Did you see my post where I told off Xurinos? No? Censorship! Big brother! I'll make another account and spam it."
In other words, hellbanning is not really different from obvious bans. And frankly, players will communicate via AIM outside of the forum anyway.
It is a lot more difficult, but there are ways that moderators can work with a community to establish the social rules and expectations, such that the entire community is in support of putting down the trolls. And the easiest way to drop a troll is to ignore them, to not validate them. After years of trying different techniques in DM, this has been the most effective.
On occasion, we still ban or delete posts, but we make the reasons clear and consistent with the ethics of the community. There is always some kind of drama of the month. Most of the time, we can just move on to doing more important/fun things like playing the game.
One addition to this: The players understand that if we had to ban them on the forum, they also have their character (associated with that account) banned. So banning is a bit more painful then a simple rejection from public communication and has to be done with due care.
What are we risking by not having this transparency on HN? By not having transparency on what accounts are banned, and why? Only the value of the discourse that occurs here.
If the value of the communications that happen here is high enough, our interest in having protections for that communication should be just as high.
If the value of this discourse is low, why are we putting on airs and pretending we need harsh measures, such as slowbanning, to protect it?
Sooner or later, any human, even one as benevolent as pg, will abuse their power over others. We need access to the reasons that accounts are secretly banned or slowbanned, so that we can pressure moderators (or whoever has that power) to wield the punishments fairly, and petition for unfair punishments to be reversed.
Or in the case of HN a philosopher king.
Deal with problem users directly and honestly. Warn them, temp-ban them if it doesn't work, permaban them if they force you to, but not without telling them why.
I'm not speaking without experience. I've been the moderator of political threads in the off-topic section of a college football board for about six years. We've had to deal with some crazies.
Making them think nothing happened but removing them from the rest of the site is extremely effective.
Blackholing IPs is a poor solution in practice, since many users can change IPs on a whim, and some ISPs run DHCP out of large subnets that may contain respectable users.
The most valuable contributors would see little (or possibly no) advertising in exchange for the value they are contributing with their time. People who are disruptive have a cost and the compensation for that would be to gradually increase the level of advertising shown to them.
Clearly, this isn't perfect, but no system is and there is at least a rationale for it.
But I have a very simple rule about websites: the site should do things that I naturally expect. If I provide a credit card, I don't expect that credit card to be used for other purchases. If I provide an email, I don't expect to be spammed. If I cancel a membership, I don't expect to be able to access the site.
And if I provide a comment that appears to be legit, I expect other people to be able to read it. When I vote something up, I expect that vote to make a difference. In short, if you provide what appears to be a way of communicating with others, it had damn well be a way of communicating.
When website owners violate that standard of fairness, sorry to say, I find it unethical. They are presenting me with a picture of the world that they know not to be true. Not as bad as using my credit card to make other purchases, but bad.
The "needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" argument is fundamentally flawed. It's the obnoxious protester who turns out to be right every now and then. It's the guy pleading for an unpopular cause that manages to sway public opinion. In short, we desperately need diversity of opinion and manners.
What happens is, people change and sites no longer serve them. Whatever the intent of the "feature", the effect seems to be preventing folks from changing. To enforce group homogeneity.
Like I said, I'm happy to be here and follow whatever rules there are. But this hellbanning shit is way fucked up. I don't care how many millions of users you have, screwing over folks for the greater good -- and lying to their face about it -- isn't a good thing at all.
How many hours of people's lives do you get to rob them of, pretending to let them publicly comment, before it's a bad thing? 10? 100? 1000? If a thousand people were actively commenting and nobody could read them, where do they go to get that part of their life back? Who says it's okay to lie like that? Just because you are a guest in somebody's house, they should treat you this way? I don't think so.
We act as if people are simply cogs in some great machine, the machine of the site. Not precious humans.
My opinion, for what it's worth. A bit over the top and theatrical, sure, but I exaggerate to make a point. Hopefully folks are able to read and understand it. There's no bright line between "I hellbanned this guy for being that .01% of folks who are impossible to deal with" and "I didn't like Joe, so let's just let him think he's contributing" You start down this road, there is no turning off. It's either acceptable or not. To me it's not.
These are tough problems, yes. But simply because you have something that works doesn't mean that it is the right thing to do. EDIT: Note slowbanning is fine. Nobody says you have to have a responsive site, just an honest one.
But the thing is, as soon as you have a big community that you're personally responsible for, you find that there are people who you just really wish would go away. They're making the place worse, possibly without even realizing it. You need to get rid of them, but if you kick them out explicitly they'll just make a new account and come back. The most important thing is to stop them making things worse right now. Anything else is secondary.
It's important to consider that online communities are in no way democratic and do not have the concept of "free speech". That's tough to swallow, having spent your whole life knowing how free speech is the most important thing ever.
"Free Speech" is you being able to write whatever you want on your blog without the government taking it down. It's very different from being able to write whatever you want on HackerNews without the spam filter taking it down.
If you need any explanation as to why, turn "showdead" on for a few days and try to pick out the content from in between the real-estate spam.
"hellbanning" in my mind, though, ought typically be applied to automated spammers and other miscreants, not actual humans with opinions, etc.
It's the obnoxious users who destroy that diversity by driving out everyone else. Getting rid of them restores it.
How many hours of people's lives do you get to rob them of, pretending to let them publicly comment, before it's a bad thing?
How many hours of your and other people's live are you willing to let a disruptive, vitrolic user steal before it's worse than the alternative?
There's no bright line between "I hellbanned this guy for being that .01% of folks who are impossible to deal with" and "I didn't like Joe, so let's just let him think he's contributing" You start down this road, there is no turning off.
Slippery slope arguments are a pretty poor excuse for an ethical system in the face of moral grey areas and conflicting issues.
The problem is, many believe this actually backfired for Titan Quest: people reviewed the game and said it was buggy and would crash often, so people didn't buy the game, even when these bugs only affected the pirates.
Couldn't this happen too, with websites that are trying to rise in popularity? If you have users that are getting slowbanned or errorbanned, they will move away from your site. They might also tell other users that your site is slow and glitchy, and to stay away as well. In the end, this could very well hurt your site more than it is helping it.
And also, what about legitimate users? If a user ever gets a 404, a slow loading page, or no one responding to their queries, they will wonder if they've been hit by a ban. Do you want legitimate users (the majority) to have to worry about something that effects only a small amount of problem users?
One good way for community members to learn what is or isn't acceptable is by example.
Approaches like disemvoweling (and like HN's graying of down-voted comments) have the advantage that the offending post is still available as an example to other members of the community, quite clearly saying "don't be like this".
Another distinction is that disemvoweling is an action taken against comments, not users. Ideally, a user's first offensive post is disemvoweled, but they're allowed to come back and make a second attempt at civil conversation.
Of course, you still need a way to deal with the persistent offenders who refuse to learn from their experiences. For them, banning of whatever flavor seems perfectly reasonable to me.
On http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/, where I've seen the most use of disemvoweling (and several discussions of it and other techniques for defending community and rational conversation), disemvoweling of a comment is often followed by a moderator's brief explanation to fellow community members what about the comment was objectionable. There's also often an invitation to the commenter to try alternative approaches to the discussion, or to join in other conversations on the site that might be easier to discuss politely.
Moderators and site-owners should take all measures at their disposal so that they can shape the overall experience of the site they envision. In the end, whatever mix of authoritarianism and democracy achieves that is fine.
That being said, hellbanning seems cruel. I think that all punishment should be explicit because the trick is to cultivate reasonable users rather than to pick and choose. I'd prefer some sort of comment rate adjustment as punishment (1 per day, 1 per hour, 1 per quarter hour, etc). As from personal experience, most obnoxious comments derive from a mixture of caffeine and passion.
Hellbanning really has to be a method of last resort for users with who repeatedly come back with problems for the community and with at least 2 admins agreeing on the ban. Not as a "i don't agree with this guy, byee".
I was once hellbanned from reddit for 2 months before i noticed it, i had never posted any really offensive posts and nothing even close to trolling, i had many top posts in discussions on the programming subredit and then suddenly the account went dark. After i noticed the ban i asked an admin about it and they did not even have a record of why it was banned, he took a look at my posts and concluded there had to be some mistake. WTF?! "Some mistake" During the ban i had spent tons of time replying to posts in thought that it would be of help or interest to someone, all just going down into some black hole.
The positive i got out of that experience was that posting on internet forums isn't worth my time and i stoped posting on almost all internet forums i had previously been active in (And yet still i am here writing this shit ^_^ )
If i made something wrong i want to know about it, not everyone is an active troll and i find it hard to believe the trolling problem is so big you have to throw away hellbans left and right without even thinking. There are many stories similar to mine, especially on reddit.