Hacker News Reader

Comment by jere | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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?

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.

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)

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).

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.

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