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Comment by byrneseyeview | Hacker News Reader

Reddit does "ninja bans" where a banned user can see his submissions, but others can't. Could you do that with arguments and long threads in general? If there's a lag of 10*2^n minutes before seeing replies in a thread n messages long, arguments will fizzle; nobody can stay specifically mad that long.

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HN has that too, AFAIK. Check out the "showdead" option in your profile - it lets you see people who've been ninja-banned (aka. hellbanned). It's not the same as delaying replies, though - that seems like something that might be helpful.

Reply delays cause "I couldn't reply in the right place, so I'll just reply in the wrong place" comments, which I find even more annoying.

A better way to do it would be to cut off responses to any thread once there are a certain number of flags in the parents.

The way it's currently set up, there's been a couple of times I've been having a valid conversation with someone, but then run into the wall of not been able to respond directly to them - no fight, no flagging, no reason given.

There are already increasing reply delays based on nesting depth, which tends to be the real indicator of a fight.

He's suggesting a cross between a hellban and the reply delay, where you can reply but your comment has to sit in purgatory for a while before anyone can read it. That way people think they've got in their two cents in the fight, but in reality they have to wait just as if they couldn't post.

It would presumably solve the problem of fights turning into a series of sibling replies or spreading to other threads where the participants see each other.

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