(l)uriel has passed away
9fans.net
9fans.net
edit:
His more recent account was http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luriel
I dug up those links because I was completely unfamiliar with uriel before seeing this post, and know nothing more about this story than that. From reading his comments, he seemed like a really smart guy. It's really a pity he's gone :-\
Latest comment - 19 days ago.
He was hellbanned for voicing a dissenting opinion in a thread about sexism.
One should not be allowed to divert from popular opinion (be it popular in society in general, in some conservative circle, or merely popular within the hip crowd), even if he is not being trollish and is providing arguments about it.
In issues where most HN people agree, you should not dissent, because we have already reached the absolute enlightenment and correct opinion on things such as "sexism". No need for discussion or argumentation any more on this front, except to agree with each other.
I propose we call those "hell-banning" provoking arguments, "thought crimes".
Which reminds me of the 3rd most popular article on HN today:
"Free speech is dying in the Western world. While most people still enjoy considerable freedom of expression, this right, once a near-absolute, has become less defined and less dependable for those espousing controversial social, political or religious views. The decline of free speech has come not from any single blow but rather from thousands of paper cuts of well-intentioned exceptions designed to maintain social harmony."
No it is NOT.
You do understand what hellbanning is, right? It means hiding their posts from everyone but them. That's right, if you were hellbanned, you wouldn't know.
Read this:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...
Hellbanning, as opposed to regular banning, a warning system or suspensions, is counterproductive, a giant waste of people's time and frankly condescending towards the userbase.
There is nothing that hellbanning (the way it's doled out on HN) solves better than regular bans, suspensions or warnings. And there are a whole lot of things it makes worse.
To me the concept of hellbanning always seemed like a real nasty practical joke, something you'd specifically code as a one-off to temporarily trick your worst, most persistent long-time troll.
As you use it as a punishment method on everyone, it becomes less effective on actual trolls (compared to regular bans), because a determined troll knows its environment, and knows to occasionally check their account via other means to see if it's been hellbanned. So for that troll, a hellban differs none from a regular ban.
Regular users, however, since the mods are not infallible (instead, on HN they are for some ill-thought-out reason invisible and unaccountable), sometimes also get caught in this. Sometimes for little reasons, sometimes they did earn some punishment for ill intentions.
However when these are not full-time trolls, it becomes really sad to see how it wastes a lot of smart people's time. They can't see they're hellbanned, I've seen some of the poor sods keep on writing comments (that people who did not switch on "show dead" cannot see) for over a year. Some of those comments are really thoughtful, as well.
When I see such a case, I browse back in their comment history to see what infraction caused their hellban. Often I have to guess, what is their most downvoted comment from just before the time their comments turn grey. As I said, unaccountable. Yes it's usually something very stupid, something that deserves all the downvotes it can get, perhaps some of it might warrant a regular ban,
but I have NEVER seen ANY hellbanned user saying something so utterly reprehensible that it would warrant wasting someone's time for over a year that they spent writing comments on HN.
The other problem is, it doesn't even notify them that they did something wrong! It's not even a slap on the wrist, they don't notice! It's just stupid.
And in the mean time, a determined troll occasionally checks if they can still see their account's comments via a proxy, and if they cannot, they simply register a new account, just as if they were banned via a regular ban.
Borderline unethical. It is an explicit and willfully applied passive-aggressive mechanism of dubious utility in response to 'perceived' attempts at trolling a forum.
Keep in mind the mechanism is designed to have a negative psychological impact on the subject and comes with a later date "haha" surprise date. I find it vile.
(Fully agree re. the waste of time, too.)
StackExchange is even worse.
If you only knew their banning practices. They have extremely thin skin. The anti-thesis of "Postal's Law".
When they ban, it's not a warning, it's permanent. One mistake and you are banned for infinity.
"Trolls" (a very subjective term) will never learn to behave as you want them to if you don't steer them toward better behavior. Banning them in knee-jerk like fashion does not steer them toward being better netizens or being more agreeable to your views.
If the thinking is "my forum, my rules" then when the rules become silly (and they often do), we need more forums, run by more reasonable people. This is nothing new. "Postal's Law" is one of those insightful ideas that has greater applicability than was intended (e.g., more than just the structure of packets) and it will continue to seem ahead of it's time, as censorship keeps rearing its ugly head.
Sure there is: griefers.
The problem is that hellbanning is the only kind of discipline, and it gets handed out too easily. And you're (probably) right that this in turn makes it less effective against griefers than it could be. But it's still more effective than a regular ban.
A hellban has its utility, but it cannot be the only method for censuring abusive users. It needs to only be applied in cases where the user is likely to try and continue to antagonize the community by dodging a regular ban, and sparingly.
The problem with hellbanning on HN is that everyone knows it's going on, and it's become such a big deal that it greatly reduces its effectiveness. As you said, if a troll suspects they're being hellbanned, they can easily just sign up for another account.
I'm of the opinion that hellbans are way too common on HN where in almost all cases a regular old suspension/ban would have sufficed.
Instead, hellbanning on HN is used on people who disagree with someone who has the power to do something about it. It's used to dismiss people who stray outside the hive and fail to toe the party line... a party line that isn't even written down anywhere.
It's lame, and IMHO pg needs to reign in some of the more obvious moderation abuses.
This is not to say that the system is perfect. Many people get banned wrongly, and I think uriel was one of those. I do think a warning system would be better in many cases. But it seems to me that most hellbans are handed out to people who are indeed simply jerks.
Hellbans are designed to be undetected by the banned party, to prevent them from reating a cat and mouse situation where site operators constantly fight to keep the banned off the site (new accounts, new IPs, etc).
Very few of the people who are being banned from the site appear to be trolls - if they're just jerks, do they not deserve to be told that they are no longer welcome
Instead we've simply silenced these people without the courtesy of even telling them, and for what?
I do think there should be a lesser level of punishment for people who aren't that incorrigible, but hellbanning jerks definitely has its place. It is the most effective countermeasure available.
Big citation needed on this. If anything, look at the namesake of this post - this is a guy who was banned for inflammatory views, but there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it, and no indication that he would've become the incessant ban-dodger had he known he was banned.
I don't think the link between espousing inflammatory views and waging a troll-war on a community is really that obvious.
> "It is the most effective countermeasure available."
In the same way a nuclear missile is the most effective countermeasure available against annoying neighbors. Technically true, but complete and utter overkill. The problem here is that on HN so many people have been hellbanned, with such regularity, who show no inclination towards being a troll, that there is a site-wide consciousness for this sort of thing, making the hellban itself less effective. You need to reserve your strongest tools for the cases that truly demand it - popping off the internet forum equivalent of a nuclear missile at every turn simply makes it less effective when you do need it.
Eh, honestly, just experience. I've served as moderator at a number of forums in my days and talked to moderators of other forums. If someone actually respected a permaban, it was a strong indicator that they weren't so bad after all, because the real jerks would just make a new account and continue. The defining quality of a jerk is that he doesn't care about other people's wishes, and that includes your wish that he go elsewhere.
> If anything, look at the namesake of this post - this is a guy who was banned for inflammatory views, but there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it, and no indication that he would've become the incessant ban-dodger had he known he was banned.
And sure enough, I have already said many times now that I didn't think he was a good candiate for a hellban. Just because I think hellbans are a good tool doesn't mean I think everybody should be hellbanned. However, I will address one point that I think gets more to the heart of the issue:
> there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it
It doesn't really matter if somebody is trolling or just an inconsiderate jerk. From the point of view of having a healthy community, I don't care why somebody is radioactively toxic — I just care that they stop doing it.
The reason Uriel was a bad hellban is that he wasn't incorrigibly toxic. But many people are just jerks, with 60% of their posts being pure nastiness, and they do need to go, and hellbans are the best way to accomplish it.
Point of order: he did discover he was banned, and he did dodge it.
(I have no problem with this, because he shouldn't have been banned, and because we long ago reached the point where it's perfectly reasonable for a user to trust their own judgement over that of a moderator.)
If these conclusions are oh so horribly wrong, then bringing them out 'in the sun' should make them self evident they are not true. And beyond that, people who make claims such as that usually have false premises in which that and other statements of fact are also just as incorrect.
The statement about people who baselessly insult (Mac-fag and ilk) we can do without in a community.
> If these conclusions are oh so horribly wrong, then bringing them out 'in the sun' should make them self evident they are not true.
You might think that, but in practice they're just shouting matches that accomplish nothing but offense. Those discussions will not convince people who are committed to their views (who are the ones most likely to start a "women are inferior"-type thread), but they will drag down the quality of conversation and lead to (for example) more overall sexist speech on Hacker News. Even if you did convince someone (which you won't 99% of the time), there's an endless supply of other jerks to keep dragging the conversation down if you let them.
There are places to talk about absolutely anything that's on your mind in whatever manner you feel like. This isn't one of them. Hacker News has standards. Not every place has to be a perfect bastion of unfettered free speech. You'll also not get to stay in my apartment very long if you call my girlfriend a prostitute, even though that is also easily disproven.
However, these were not topics I had in mind for ethics or such. We deal with in this community the ethics and morality of business and commerce. Along side, we deal with programmers who can do great good or great harm. These are more controversial topics I think about.
DRM
(RI/MP)AA
governments (US and others)
Immigration
piracy
filesharing technology
bitcoin
laws intersecting commerce (AirBNB, UBER)
As an example, I use GNU extensively and am a communist (used in sense of economic policy). I also have no issue in using pirated anything. That right there probably goes against 99% of the companies present.
I may choose to, and have chosen to debate whether or not blacks are inferior, but it's stressful and annoying. It's something better reserved for a certain frame of mind and known venue.
So, I assume that given some threshold of are-women-inferior discussions, many interesting women just stop showing up at your party. It's natural that certain topics are more sensitive (especially to people placed on the defensive), and that you don't just drop them like bombs in an unrelated conversation / venue.
I don't personalize it or "blame" Graham for it; I understand why he started the practice. But he should stop now.
Everyone has some controversial viewpoints on _some_ topic. But that's not the point. I really don't care what programmers think about politics, religion, sexism or topics not related to computing. This guy had a refined taste for programming. Aesthetics. Plan 9, cat -v, suckless, Go. Not perfection, but sooooo much better than so much else.
The idea of hellbanning people who can actually think outside the box is troubling. Send them to some isolated, limited audience forum ("hell"?) if you wish. Just tell us where it is if we want to read it. Because I certainly do.
> No it is NOT.
> You do understand what hellbanning is, right? It means hiding their posts from everyone but them. That's right, if you were hellbanned, you wouldn't know.
That is why it's the only effective measure against trolls. If you ban a troll the old-fashioned way, they can just make a new account. Hellbanning prevents or at least greatly delays this in most cases, making it a more effective countermeasure than pretty much anything else we can practically implement.
I switched on "show dead" and immediately came across a guy who seems to be hellbanned 463 days ago and still is posting ... now I feel heartbroken. I can only imagine what he would feel ...
But your first sentence needs adjustment: Free speech is something a government takes away from its citizens. It's a fundamental right held by everyone in the world. There are governments that fail to protect it, and of course many that actively violate it.
Though I do not share these concerns as far as message board moderation is concerned, I believe there is often a good reason why people tend to invoke free speech instinctively in these cases. The expectation is that basic rights are not so much special allowances patronizingly handed down from the government intended for an increasingly narrow context but should instead be understood as innate personhood rights enabling people to live a free and dignified life.
> "uriel has died peacefully a few days ago after having arranged everything very carefully."
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/11h7ab/9fans_ur...
Thank you Uriel.
Er, no. Happens to run on Linux, as well as other Unix-likes. Ordinarily this would be a nitpick, but not in the context of Uriel.
One of the old guard falls, inevitably to be replaced by 100 more squawking, jibbering, passionless "geeks" unwilling to form unique opinions of their own accord. Here's to the outliers.
I wouldn't have thought it controversial to say that as a result, the kind of people you meet in IT becomes generally more bland and predictable with every passing day. That's simply due to there being so many more, all vastly better connected and less inclined wander their own paths, and where every imaginable problem has been encountered and blogged about 100 times before the average person even considers it.
If I'm not mistaken, this is his Google+: https://plus.google.com/105846208800330724949/about.
RIP, fellow programmer.
I didn't realize up to today who he actually was.
What the heck happened? Was he seriously ill? Judging from the commments I saw, his mind was apparently in good shape.
RIP luriel and condolences to his family.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q6koeeQNJYMore recently I've been following his Go related posts. The word of his passing came as quite a shock, he will be missed by many.
I still don't understand who this person is
> about: Undead.
A true loss.