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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

It has hellbanning, and, apart from, obviously, pg, I don't know a single person who thinks it's a good idea. Since I have showdead on I've seen numerous comments by people who have been hellbanned for years and still don't realise. The really horrible thing is, most of their comments are perfectly legit - sometimes all of their comments.

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.

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I have no problem with hellbanning and am particularly glad to have 'pg and the HN illuminati managing it without community input. It's kind of horrifying to think about the level of drama that would come with transparency and "accountability" over who's hellbanned.

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.

This is notably the first time I've found myself disagreeing with you, in many kilocomments over the past several years.

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.

i certainly agree - people can have off days, for which the punishment of permanent non-inclusion in the community (so long as they don't find out) is really harsh and unfair, worsened by the fact that there seems to be no method of recourse for anyone it's inflicted upon..

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..

there actually is a method of recourse: email pg and have a conversation about it. i am aware of quite a number of people who have at one time been hellbanned and have had that ban reversed.

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.

That's one thing SomethingAwful---which I believe coined the term "hellbanning" and popularized it---did better than most subsequent implementations imo. It's one of several kinds of bans there, and typically used when the person in question has in fact already been normal-banned before (sometimes several times), and come back with new accounts. Reduces the false-positive rate that way. (It was also more effective for that purpose back in the days when it was used very rarely, and not widely known about.)

You should disagree with me more often. It's more fun, and even I only agree with about 97% of what I write.

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.

Of course pg isn't intentionally cruel or capricious — but he does not assume good faith in others

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

I support hellbanning.

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.

> Does it completely prevent this? No

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.

>I remember reading a science fiction story...

That story was "To See The Invisible Man" [1] by Robert Silverberg. There's apparently an adaptation in an episode of The Twilight Zone.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_See_the_Invisible_Man

Thanks for the reference. That is, indeed, the story!

I find myself in a double bind about the idea. On one hand, it's a pretty passive-aggressive way of dealing with problem users. On the other hand, I can't think of any better ideas. The thing about problem users is that if you don't take care of them quickly enough, they tend to gather a following that ruins things for everyone else.

Why is it passive-aggressive? I see people here talking as if it was the responsibility of the community to engage with and resolve the problems of challenging and unproductive members. How many hours in the day are there? Why is it our expectation that everyone is owed attention, forbearance, and even satisfaction? These aren't social services we're talking about. There's no "due process" clause.

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?

It isn't. It's just that as a general rule of thumb, I believe in openness and transparency as the morally correct thing to do, and I suspect pg agrees with me. Don't you agree with that at least to some extent?

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?

If someone comes in and brazenly violates the rules and values of a community, they can't turn around and expect to benefit from those rules and values later on. They've broken the social contract. Hellbanning is perfectly transparent to everyone in the community except people who are hellbanned.

A problem arises, however, when what appears “brazen” to people who have already interacted with a community for a long period is not so obvious to anyone else. Many community standards (such as “nice”) are nebulous and have vastly differing thresholds and signaling methods, and this is not something that can be easily resolved up-front. Applying subterfuge early in the process makes it possible for a well-meaning entrant to randomly lose by misinterpreting things early on, then being denied feedback that would allow them to make a more informed decision about their behavior. They are further punished by throwing their participatory resources into an invisible hole while thinking all is well. This is easily nontrivial collateral damage, depending on the set of visitors.

This. I've seen some long, serious, insightful [dead] comments which turned out to be from users hellbanned quite a while ago. If they aren't deliberately trolling, tricking them into continually wasting their time this way is a terrible thing to do.

Parking your car so that it blocks the alley is a terrible thing to do. Eating all the skin off a bucket of fried chicken is a terrible thing to do (as is buying a bucket of fried chicken). Serving warm beer is a terrible thing to do.

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?

Then tell them to leave. Don't waste their time.

Why? So they can yell at us? Because we owe them?

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 sent dozens of those emails over the years. It's only a small fraction of the [dead] productive comments I find, but not that many people have contact info or googleable usernames.

We don’t owe them. Lying to people is just wrong.

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?

Whenever I've turned on showdead, the only hellbanned comments I've seen were either patent nonsense or worse. Sometimes it was a user that alternates between legitimate comments and patent nonsense. Do you have an example to share?

If I may toot my own horn, I submit my old account, chbarts, for your consideration.

Fair enough. You were a bit of an asshole around the time you were hellbanned, but you had a fair number of decent contributions afterwards.

Your comments weren't nonsensical. They just had a bad habit of calling people names.

I submit my previous account, "bbot", as well.

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.

The biggest problem I have with this is the wasted energy by the hellbanned.

I'm finding myself not having trouble with wasting the time of people who previously sunk their time into deliberately wasting everyone else's time.

The old eye for an eye chestnut, eh? It's fine for a time, but if the account remains active there ought to be some form of review.

"An eye for an eye" is about revenge. This is about valuing someone else's time no more highly than they value yours.

You seem to think that the hellbanned masses are all trolls, and that is absolutely not the case.

Many of them were just too passionate about a particular issue one day. Quite a few seem to have done nothing untoward at all.

Rubbish. It's about inflicting a punitive measure on those who violate the community's rules.

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.

I didn't hellban anybody. But I have an idea who did. And, you know what? If you're gonna ask me, "who's more likely acting in good faith, the hellbanners on HN or the hellbanned?" it's not even a little challenging for me to answer that. The people managing HN are not mean-spirited.

I didn't hellban anybody. But I have an idea who did. And, you know what? If you're gonna ask me, "who's more likely acting in good faith, the hellbanners on HN or the hellbanned?" it's not even a little challenging for me to answer that. The people managing HN are not mean-spirited.

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.

Being "invisible" for a year surrounded by people would be an interesting experience, I think.

Besides, of course, the practical problems such as how do you buy food. Do you have to steal it? (Easy, as nobody "sees" you)

Yeah, they had to steal it, and I t was easy - but that was considerably outweighed by the mental consequences of having no social interactions for a year.

When I first read what "hellban" is my first thought was "6th sense".

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