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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Besides, of course, the practical problems such as how do you buy food. Do you have to steal it? (Easy, as nobody "sees" you)
That story was "To See The Invisible Man" [1] by Robert Silverberg. There's apparently an adaptation in an episode of The Twilight Zone.