Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us

280 pointsjerrya91 comments

I browse Hacker News with show dead on, and what I see is that increasingly Hacker News is becoming haunted, with more and more undead walking amongst us. Not knowing they are dead; making comments no one will read. Worse, I often find that the comments of the dead are interesting and have value.

I realize they were killed off for a reason, and I realize that moderating is a tedious pain and a real chore, but it makes me feel sad to see that people who have taken the time to enter a good comment in good faith, will never have it seen. It leads me to wonder if their death wasn't a mistake.

And it makes me feel lessened to participate in that.

I wonder if it might be more fair to our undead to either inform them of their ban after a time, to resurrect them after a time, or to give to the rest of us with show dead set a way to give them a resurrection upvote. To indicate they seem to be participating in good faith, and allow a way bring them back to life after enough some period of time.

Anyway, it's not often we can bring the dead back to life, ....

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This actually wasn't my first account. I lurked for a while and then finally decided to join.

When I first joined, I commented for a few weeks and then stumbled into a conversation that involved Steve Jobs and poaching employees. The top comment was talking about how greedy Jobs was and I replied pointing out that he had taken $1 in salary and no stocks for several years. I wasn't totally clear in my first comment and by the time I got done explaining, I was ghost banned. From a single comment.

I went on for a while and out of spite, I kept posting replies even though I knew they wouldn't be viewed. A few people messaged me on other channels to let me know. I'm not sure what the solution is here, but that experience wasn't fun.

An appeal process that allows others to point out the unfairness of the situation.

Also, look at which down-voters are subject to the most appeals might indicate who's being vindictive.

An appeal process exists. It's pretty much e-mailing info@ycombinator.com and saying something like "Hey, have I been banned? Please undo!" (if you feel you were unfairly banned), or "Hey, I realize I said something that I shouldn't have said. I'm sorry -- please consider unbanning?"

In my experiences the people in charge of making these decisions are fairly prudent.

I did this some time ago with another account, and was ignored.

This is usually what happens in INTJ dominated environments. Trigger happy and sometimes nonsensical.

I'm not sure that "trigger happy and nonsensical" is restricted to "INTJ" communities. As far as I've read, the Myers-Briggs personality test is as predictive of behavior as is a fortune cookie.

Do you have a link to the comments of the old account?

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nluqo

I may not have remembered everything perfectly, but there you go.

Sometimes people on hacker news would rather vote down a comment than to fact check or try to use compassion and understand the other person's point of view. pg disabled voting down comments within threads you are a part of but I don't know if it's enough...

How did you know you were "ghost banned"? Do you get an email or something?

Aside from someone else clueing you in, wouldn’t you notice after a while that you don’t get any upvotes anymore? (or downvotes for that matter)

This wasn't clear?:

"A few people messaged me on other channels to let me know."

How did those people know?

You can set "showdead" to "yes" in your profile. (This option might only be available beyond some karma threshold.)

It's available to new accounts.

In your profile you can set an option to "show dead" - this shows hellbanned users.

I just turned this on. What differentiates these comments from others? Do usernames show up in a different color or something like that?

It was quite some time ago that I was hell-banned, but I think it was because my account got progressively slower, and I wasn't getting any replies or upvotes. I think I might of googled 'why is hacker news slow', and that's how I found out.

are you sure? see my other reply to you here. you can easily check if you are hellbanned by logging out and seeing if you can see your posts. the site is sometimes slow and often people don't reply...

Ah dang. I don't think I was actually. I don't think I'll go back to my old account though - I have karma on this one that I'd prefer to hang on to (in case I make a stupid comment one day and get down-voted heavily).

This was a while ago, but I think I had read about ghost banning on HN before it happened. I'm assuming the same for the people who messaged me.

Slashdot's moderation system is much better in this regard. The users starting score for new posts first goes to 0 and then -1 so that the comment will be collapsed by default reducing visibility but they can still accrue upvotes and karma allowing the users starting score to recover instead of turning the site into a zombie town where the zombies don't know they're dead.

I think the best solution would be a per account killfile.

Letting somebody post while dead without them realizing it is a kind of emotional abuse called gaslighting, which is based on confusing a person about the nature of the reality they experience. It doesn't have to be intentional for it to be abuse. By hell-banning accounts without notice you are basically denying the person's perceptions; they wonder what's wrong with them, why doesn't anybody care about what they say, when everybody else can see they are dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

Even without banning accounts, I find that the greying out of downvoted posts is a kind of public humiliation for bad behavior. At the very least, the option not to have the text greyed out would be nice.

And then finally, this entire thread is violating the HN guidelines:

> Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com.

So it's not like they're going to be particularly open to feedback, and I would be surprised if anything came of this. There's a feature requests link at the bottom that is the right place to post this, but it's basically ignored.

USENET had this (per-account killfile); ended up with a hack to do "global cancels" to try to contain spam, though. There's probably a role for both.

The problem with individual user killfiles is you then end up with weird conversations where some people can't see some of the responses, leading to duplication and confusion.

Being able to "killfile" certain submitters or certain sources of articles or certain tags/topics/etc. might work better, and would be a lot simpler.

Yeah, I saw the tail end of all that. One difference is that newsgroups don't have the same precise threading that HN does. I would be okay with not only killing comments on a per user basis but also killing all replies to those comments. So don't show me any submissions that SparrowOS makes, don't show me any of his comments, and don't show me any replies to those comments. Conceptually easy, but perhaps expensive in some cases such as looking through another user's comment history.

I used to keep a spreadsheet of dead accounts I saw, but I haven't looked at it in over a year. I had a column for whether they deserved to be banned - I'd check their history and try to figure out at which point they had been banned, attempting to discern the original reason. I was a bit disconcerted with how often it was a quite innocent comment, and how valuable many of contributions were in general.

I had intended to release this spreadsheet to the HN community, but it really was not at all comprehensive, and I forgot about it over time. Perhaps if members here would volunteer to maintain a list of such cases.. We don't need PG to implement anything then, every week he could just be sent a list of users that ought to be unbanned.

I also have tried to figure out the original reason for hellbanning, and I think there are a lot of instances where you could chalk it all up to a temporary lapse of judgement. Sure there are extreme cases where people are nuts, trolls, or both, but that is probably a fraction of cases.

I upvote dead comments that I find value in. If that currently has no impact, I think that it should. What better way to resurrect the dead than by community upvotes?

I browse with showdead on, and if there is a good [dead] post, I upvote it. I'm assuming that must do something, or is it just a placebo button[1]?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button

Inherent in getting shadowbanned is not knowing or understanding why it occurred. My previous account had almost a thousand points, and though I made the occasional drunk rant, they were rightfully downvoted. To take away someone's voice, who clearly isn't a spammer, without them knowing, is a shitty thing to do.

We're all human, and make mistakes. It's sad to be silenced unknowingly. I love reading some the insightful comments on HN and following the discussions, but the hellbanning policy is one of the reasons I prefer Reddit and am more likely to contribute there (despite it's own issues). It feels like a much more open and friendlier community because there isn't that fear of being shunned for a single infraction hanging over you.

Yeah, I certainly have my "moments" where I say something stupid or out of line, and I take the downvotes as a rightful correction to my excesses, generally speaking.

That said, I mostly just upvote interesting comments and ignore the rest.

People aren't simply good or bad. There are a lot of people who are good most of the time, but occasionally assault someone. In fact, most of the people who assault other people probably only do it occasionally. Which means if you looked at random time slices from the lives of people in prison for assault, they'd almost always be doing something innocent.

Now I'm going to kill this thread, because as it says in the guidelines,

  Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something 
  (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to 
  ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say
  something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com.

I agree, though as a compromise I have a suggestion that shouldn't overload the moderators.

Leave them dead but let us vote up the good comments and "undead" just those that are deemed by the community to be relevant or insightful (I won't recommend how many up-votes that should take).

or, users can chose to ignore other users as they see fit, and those users will appear dead to them (in other words, a per-account killfile.) They can also choose to "cure undead" on hellbanned users and have them appear live and they can reply to them. This has the benefit of appearing to preserve the status quo for those who think hellbanning is awesome.

The hellbanning/ghostbanning/whatever is one of a very few things that disturbs me about this community. I can see how it could prevent the problem of a banned user immediately creating new usernames, but it's also easy to imagine how it could be abused.

I keep "showdead" on and I have occasionally seen a user marked as dead whose comments didn't seem to me to warrant that. I support the resurrection vote idea.

A simple solution is to make sure there is some way of contacting you in your profile. If I come across an account that is making comments in good faith but has been hellbanned, then I look to their profile. If I can find a way to contact them, I do. Usually they e-mail `info@ycombinator.com` and get their account reinstated. It seems like other folks here participate in a similar Friendly Neighbor policy.

It's important for people to include an email in their 'about' box on their profile, so that other HN users can get in contact.

HN seems to be pretty good about letting people know that they're banned, either by email or in threads. It's probably a good idea to check their comment history before letting them know.

jere's comment is disturbing. I tend to stay away from some hotbutton topics now, and anything involving certain companies involves weird voting (both up and down). That's a great shame on a site like HN.

I was partly shadow-banned myself, on this account -- my comments would show up, but not my submissions. I only figured it out months after it happened (I just assumed the things I was submitting weren't catching peoples' interest for some reason), which was frustrating. At the time the account had more than 4,000 karma, which I would have thought would have been a decent indicator that I wasn't a troll.

I eventually got the ban lifted, but only after writing HN and asking them to do it. I never got any notice that I'd been banned, or really any rational explanation about what I'd done to cause the ban, either by email or in a thread, from HN admins or anyone else. My profile has both an email address and a link to an "About Me" page with my contact information on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., so it's not like I'm hard to find.

Even though the ban eventually got lifted, it really knocked my opinion of this community down a few notches. Passive-aggressive measures like hell-banning/shadow-banning/etc. should be last resorts used for silencing hard-core trolls. If they're used too widely, they break down the trust a community needs to have in its mods to function properly.

I also got some sort of partial "status reduction", less than a full ban: my ability to flag posts disappeared. I sent an e-mail and got it reinstated. But I still have no idea what I might have done wrong, and neither does the HN moderator who reinstated me.

I understand that the HN mods don't want to have to explain every action, and when someone really deserves a partial or full ban they don't want to announce it and cause the person to just evade it. I've been in the position of moderating several forums (none quite this big) and I know it's difficult to keep out the trolls and keep false positives low. But the false positive rate on HN seems very high to me. Some of these methods seem to be too widely used on too many good contributors with too little explanation, and as you say, that breaks down the trust the community needs.

I've also had a partial "ghosting" along with "status reduction" but I never did ask for reinstatement etc...

Eventually my posts were given legibility but the experience lessened my respect for this community, as my offending comment had to do with American fascism (pre Snowden revelations) but now I try not to "grind my axe" here when I'm downvoted.

I have seen that some users here will downvote certain others regardless of the content of their posts and this practice is unbecoming of rational individuals. Apparently the powers-that-be notice this also, as I have regained some of my lost status, and some of my posts still receive upvotes, so I'd say that the moderation of this site is working as is.

I lost flag ability recently. I must have overdone it. I had definitely been flagging a lot of non-tech posts that seem better suited for general news sites.

It actually happens more often than you think[1]. Also happened to me recently.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847829

I also lost Flag privileges, I thought I was being helpful to the community, but I guess not!

I just noticed I don't have flag privileges either, at least for comments (I still have them for submissions.) I'm sure I used to. I can't remember ever having flagged anything. Is this based on karma levels or something else? Now I'm worried I've done something wrong.

>It's important for people to include an email in their 'about' box on their profile, so that other HN users can get in contact.

The funny part is I didn't have contact info. I only added it to this account a few weeks ago. Some charitable person decided to google my username and found one of my accounts on another site.

This has been brought up a bunch of times before. An Upvote for dead comments should make them visible. I was once shadow banned on an older account. I don't remember what I said, but it wasn't that bad. I had made like 10 or so effort-posts until I realize someone had monkeyed with my account.

edit: Also, if you get so many upvotes on your comments, say 20, you are automatically un-shadow-banned.

I suggest it should take multiple upvotes before any sort of automated system kicks in. Maybe 4-5 upvotes should make a previously dead comment visible.

I also suggest that un-shadow-banning should not be automated. Enough upvotes over time could trigger a "review this account" e-mail, but it should still be up to a moderator to look over the account and give the final say.

This is not my first account. 'bjz' was hell-banned: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bjz It was very disheartening - it was a year before I decided to re-register.

Anyway, I understand the reasoning behind the current system (HN is a huge target for potential spammers), but it really does create a climate of fear. Unfortunately I don't have a solution to this.

were you doing some weird voting? because the comments / submissions don't seem to justify banning. normally with banned accts it's obvious why.

in fact, are you sure you were banned? apart from the last comment, which might have been deleted, it doesn't seem to me like you were hellbanned. your other comments are not greyed out.

Interesting, perhaps I wasn't. I know I tried to make a submission or two and it said 'Slow down!' all the time, and that the site was very slow. I assumed this meant I was banned.

My old account: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Devilboy

Not sure what happened.

Same here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=salmanapk

Felt like a jackass when I found out. Humans become evil when given authority over others.

I don't know who the moderators are or exactly how this works, but I believe that some of them may be abusing their position at times to shut down opinions that are contrary to their own.

I agree. I browse with showdead on as well, and the amount of zombies is significant.

This was rather surprising to me. I didn't realise that Hacker News had such a feature and never spotted the "show dead" button on my profile page. I have turned it on now and I agree, there seems to be many users where you have to wonder if banning was the correct action.

Perhaps this feature is best left for blatant trolls and spammers. Perhaps only to be done by admins (with a reason given).

The approach does feel a bit out of place here, although it's hard to tell if my view on that is due to "hellbanning" being associated so much in my mind with SomethingAwful. I'm not sure if they invented it, but afaik they're responsible for popularizing it in the late 1990s. It seems to fit their forum-management culture: dealing with trolls by coming up with various ways to, in effect, counter-troll them, some of them more lighthearted/prankish and others more insidious.

I was quite surprised to find it here, since the culture here doesn't seem very similar to SA's.

From some point comments of my main account stopped getting upvotes. After seing this post I thought that maybe I am dead and given the assumption that you can't see if yourself are dead I created a separate account and inspected my comments. Sadly, it turns out my comments are just bad :(. I don't know which answer I hoped for.

I learned that I'd been ghostbanned for over a year when someone finally contacted me off-site and let me know. I figured out which comment it was, emailed info@ with an explanation (that it was actually complimentary and relevant to the thread in question), and asked to be restored. They did so within a couple of hours.

I feel like I am in one of those ghost films where the ghosts don't know they're dead.

I'm in that situation. Somewhere along the line I said something that annoyed a mod and now I can't even create a new account - it's instantly marked 'dead' automatically. Must be either a cookie or perhaps my IP is banned.

Your i_am_dead account does not seem to be dead though.

This is from a different computer. My main computer is now useless for HN. Old account here: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Devilboy

I once read a similar thread but swinging the other way. It was how to get rid of mean people and written by the apparent administrator of the site. When I was in a trivial position of authority once I found that I could deal with troublemakers by making them uncertain. Unlike a court of law, uncertainty is available to this site. The whole thread back then was longer than a certain book while I won't bore you the title with. All I ask is to make of those who do not believe their own passions, necromantic dust. I am unvarying in the websites that I read each day and do not know of an alternative for Hacker News yet.

I don't know what the exact answer is, but I agree with the sentiment. There is already a showdead for a reason, and I assume it is the same sentiment. I also dont see that many dead posts that I find objectionable or worth removing their comment because it contains someones interpretation of a little too much snark.

I agree with your sentiment. Saying nobody reads their comments is incorrect, however.

Especially when I follow that by saying I read the comments!

(But for the most part, no one reads the comments of the dead.)

If online polls were reliable, that would be an interesting one to set up. I too always read the dead comments, and given the curious nature of hackers, I suspect many others are.

Make a poll: "Is the post linked to in this post visible?" then link to a post you've made from a dead account. The dead post is itself a poll that says "This is the real poll, if you see this post, vote yes on this poll."

I think the only time I've been banned was when I refreshed the "new" page too quickly to see how something I'd submitted was being upvoted. I was banned for a few days. Frustrating - but lesson learned.

Are you sure that's the reason you were banned? "Refreshing the 'new' page too quickly" does not seem like legitimate grounds for banning to me...

Dear op: Why wasn't this a poll? I want to vote yes.

People who upvote polls tend to forget to upvote the story as well.

Am I dead? I haven't participated much in conversation but I know the few posts I made awhile back didn't get much response.

Nope, you're alive ;)

If you were dead we wouldn't be able to reply to your comment :)

How can you tell if you are dead?

Set your 'showdead' to on in your profile page and go back to look at your comments. They'll show [dead] next to them. Alternatively log out and see if your comments are still visible.

That won't tell you if you are dead though. I think that is what OP was asking.

Actually it does show your own comments as [dead]. Or at least it did for me a month or two ago when I tried it. It's how I found out I was dead.

Interesting. My comment was made after reading through other posts in this thread. I always thought "dead" just meant heavily downvoted comments.

Hmm wonder if I'm dead.

guess not.

I'm not sure how I feel about necromancy.

If resurrection is not approved I'd settle for the ability to reply to their comments.

The problem with that is the dead users will always be told they're dead, defeating the purpose. Unless... replies to dead users' comments are hidden from the dead user.

Just having a 'showdead' option defeats the purpose already.

Dead comments cannot receive replies.

no?

My old account:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=chbarts

What a waste

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