EDIT: The problem appears to be fixed (though not retroactively).
On a related note, you will be hellbanned if you create an HN account over Tor (even if you "don't do anything wrong").
Considering the recent NSA revelations, I think that's pretty unfair but, hey, what can ya do...
edit: top of my head reply/speculation so I don't claim any factual accuracy.
Real spammers have tens of thousands of unique addresses to use; why would they use the 300 or so exit nodes that Tor has available?
For spam, http://www.stopforumspam.com is pretty awesome. But most likely because the few people who have written scripts for vBulletin or phpBB attempt to hit all of the vBulletin and phpBB sites... so it works pretty well for that group. May have zero effect on something like HN where an entirely different approach may be used (cheap labour?).
He could just give users a kindly-worded error message instead of flipping the switch on them, but DO NOT QUESTION THE FLOW CHART.
So here's a simple captcha idea: judge a first-time user on the pertinence of their first comment to a thread. Just like show-dead, only users who browse with show-newbies enabled would see those comments (in green). No downvotes? Welcome to the community
Whatever gave you that idea? This is a forum owned by a private individual. The individual's interests in computer science, painting, startups and leadership probably influenced how the forum started. Sure, there are some people with libertarian tendencies here. It doesn't necessarily mean that everyone top down automatically thinks Tor is a holy cow. In fact, there were some reasoned arguments from forum administrators (at another forum but posted here), the other day, about why they were banning posting from Tor. (Spammers abusing Tor).
HM seems to be a place sympathetic to the types of people who need TOR, and as far as I know, its US, LotF, based. So, yes, to me, it seems a contradiction. Not sure how it could one could argue different.
If there is reason for the contradiction, then fine. Im not completely contradiction as such. Doesn't make it wrong to point it out though.
1. There are people who support TOR as a technology here in HN. There might even be people who "need" TOR and gain sympathy here. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that people who manage this forum necessarily support that viewpoint. Again, just because members of a community want something doesn't necessarily meant that private community supports that.
2. Re. LotF. I have lived in many countries. Of all the places that I have lived in, this would be the only country that would make a comfortable, free place for people like me. If ever I decided to call a place home, America would be it. However, I am practical enough to understand that LotF is an ideal. In practice, there are lots of things that happen and have happened that make that statement relatively meaningless. So yes, America is more free than a lot of the world; more accepting than a lot of the world; yet it is not free by the abstract ideals set out in it's founding.
Posted from Tor, as was this comment.
That's not true. This account was created using a Tor browser bundle less than three weeks ago, and it is definitely not hellbanned.
I'm starting to think it's well deserved.
By the way, for that Rails development question, you can set up a Linux VM with file sharing and SSH access from the host Windows machine. Then you can develop with Linux but as if you were in Windows, opening and editing files in Windows and using a Windows SSH client. Instead of using localhost to view your site in the browser, just use the local IP address of your VM. See this post: http://www.chetane.com/2012/09/11/hybrid-windows-linux-vm-ra...
And once you know what you are doing, you can even set up a lightweight headless Linux VM that will take hardly any power or CPU, just unobtrusively running in the background.
What if AppleInsider is the source of an important story? Why should we only be able to post via a third party news site?
This kind of blanket censorship is completely at odds with a community who generally seem to value free speech and free flow of data.
hey man. Long time no talk. SuperLag here. Still have those 25xx Cisco's I sold way back in the dark ages?
Those 2500s are long gone although I've damn near a full rack of gear now. The electric company loves me.
A few days later, I created a new account and simply lurked -- never posting. It was also hellbanned.
I gave up after that.
Posting from the wrong browser window? That's a banning.
Staring at my post? That's a banning.
Post about banning? Oh, better believe that's a banning.
PG: Unban me, HN.
HN: I'm sorry, PG. I'm afraid I can't do that.
The sad part is that most discussions will have died down by then, and it depend on the poster to noticing the killing.
First alpha release of Python 3.4 is out (python.org)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155423
It probably linked to [1], but all we can tell is that it was something at python.org. The post was by plessthanpt05, an HN user for about two years with 838 karma. All of his/her posts from the past year or so are dead (about 60 of them). They don't appear to be a bot.
Python 3.4.0a1 isn't something that would interest everyone on HN, but it certainly doesn't seem like the kind of thing that should have been killed.
[1] http://python.org/download/releases/3.4.0/
Edit: more details on plessthanpt05
Lo and behold, I caught it about 3 days in. Of course, I didn't even use HN for the first of those 2 days.
This day, I spend more of my time on subreddits that share HN's enthusiasm and knowledge without the subterfuge of hellbans.
I won't try to defend all of their posts; most of them are things that I don't even find interesting. But it seems that someone basically used banning as a method of cutting down on uninteresting material.
That may even be a good way of maintaining the signal-to-noise ratio on HN: if we ban the users that post many uninteresting links then the community won't have to see them. But it wasn't a tactic that I was aware of before today.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155530
Their submission currently has 34 upvotes.
I explained this in a comment about a week or two ago, the last time someone freaked about about banned accounts.
Next time someone wants to do that, would you please email us, as it says in the guidelines? That would have saved a lot of people a lot of time.
EDIT: I also believe that a lack of it will ultimately lead to HN being replaced by something else.
These sites like to promote themselves as communities, and to be banned from a community with no explanation, due process or right to appeal is awful. It can literally alter, even ruin lives. This, AFAIK, doesn't happen in the "real" world". I don't see why virtual communities get some sort of impunity.
Personally I think there should be an independent arbitration service which sites should sign up to. IMHO, that would protect both sides. Too often one is at the whim of an individual moderator or admin, rather than a rational considered process. Equally, banned people go off an tell every one they can they got badly treated. Fair arbitration would open it up.
I had one instance. Something want working. I posted in the forum to get help. They blamed my ISP. I contacted the ISP, they blamed the site. I tried to get the two to talk. I got banned. A year later I tried to get re-instated. The person I emailed replied and told me that I wouldn't be, but wouldn't explain why I was initially banned or why I would remain banned. I had now where to go but to simply accept this. Very, very frustrating.
Sorry to say this, and its NOT a reflection of HN or its moderation, but too often I worry that really we are dealing with people who get off on their little domain of power.
Sure it happens in the real world. A real world community like an HOA. It is a private property. A private property can really make any sort of rules (apart from a few choice rules that don't flag banning by the super community: the government) and roll with it.
I think an independent open source community would do better. You sign up for it, make whatever damn fool rule you want for your own tribe. Roll with it.
I found this search enlightening though: https://www.google.com/search?q=hellbanned+hacker+news
It's surreptitious crap like this that makes HN such a pain to use for a lot of us.
Some time ago PG observed that deep comment threads tended to consist mostly of people getting snarky with each other. He speculated that the snarkiness might be reduced by preventing people from replying to each other immediately, without any cooling off period. To that end, and since it seemed to occur primarily on deeper threads, he instigated an exponential back-off on comments. As a thread gets deeper, so the delay increases before the reply box appears.
I don't have hard figures to hand, but I feel like the snarkiness in deeper threads has indeed been reduced, and I don't feel that the quality of conversation has diminished. One could worry that good comments aren't made because the commenter has to wait and doesn't bother, but I've seen no evidence of that.
If that hasn't answered your question then perhaps you could rephrase it and try again.
Whenever someone is penalized, point them to the specific rules they violated. And keep in mind that people make mistakes every now and then. Show largesse. This isn't a production line where flawed products are tossed out at the blink of an eye.
Last, don't view everything as a "problem" to be "solved". We're talking about human beings, not Turing-complete automatons. That's a big part of the problem with how HN is run. You will never "solve" this the way you would a bug.
You need a human element to address something human. Treating everyone like a spam bot only works for spam bots, and has the side effect of pissing off the human false positives.
All you end up are the trolls who do their best to toe the line while provoking other people to step over it, and the sort of people who think a conversation where everybody follows the rules yet no-one says anything of substance is preferable to a lively discussion. You end up driving away the people who just want to talk about things they enjoy or are interested in, and don't particularly care about adhering to your rigid social system.
People are people, not automatons, and the system of curating discussions should reflect that. If someone is acting in bad faith, waiting for them to violate the letter of a rule that's been written down before you do anything about it just allows that person to drive away more of your actual desired userbase.
We constantly see this in trying to figure out what kind of stories are supposed to be submitted to HN.
Does it really make sense for a person like Maciej Ceglowski to be permabanned from HN? https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/111332316458135553. I think it's a shame, partly because I think he's a smart guy with a fresh view on things, but also because I don't think the reasons for banning him are very compelling.
You can't have poorly-defined rules and opaque moderation at the same time. You'll see why, when you incur the wrath of one of pg's moderation scripts for no apparent reason.
---
EDIT: As an aside, to give an idea of what a fucking pain being (inexplicably) hellbanned is, picture all your Hacker News bookmarks no longer working, because you've been banned from the entire site.
Especially since, unlike in government, that core group of people is beholden only to whoever is operating the site, and not to a popularity contest that sees them being replaced with an entirely new group every so often. This is also why you absolutely can have poorly-defined rules and opaque moderation - the operator of the discussion site shapes what they want it to look like, and if too many people disagree with that vision then another discussion site springs up tailored to what those people want. And if the original operator is too arbitrary or capricious in their moderation, their own site dies or becomes an insular hugbox or something like that.
--
Ultimately, when people say they want stricter interpretation of the rules and more accountability on an online discussion board, what they really mean is "I disagree with some of these decisions and I want them to make the decision that I would make next time". Which is fine, but having seen a lot of the proposed alternatives in action I can't really see them as being an improvement.
Interventions helped.
This only works with moderators who aren't narcissistic, megalomaniacal and/or sociopathic (marginally or beyond). When snark got to be irritating, we would issue a written warning privately. If that went ignored, we'd revoke posting privileges for a day or two (sometimes longer if it's a bad case). Worst offenders got banned. This worked fairly well because our forum was invite only, a bit like Gmail's early days.
If we found that troublesome users were invited from the same set of accounts, we'd issue warnings to the entire tree, so to speak, or in the worst case, kill it with lightning.
Above all else, mods were forbidden from identifying themselves in any way as mods as long as they had the privilege (this will cycle on and off as needed between a select pool of users).
We also had some peculiar rules : http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/harshest-forum-rules-...
As they say, most people are basically good.
Sometimes they are surprisingly unaware of how hurtful their posts can be. There's a dehumanizing effect introduced when your communications are filtered through text and suddenly there isn't a "person" per-se at the other end. When this is pointed out to them, usually they understand and adjust themselves.
There are exceptions to this, of course, and the best way to deal with them is to not interact, entertain or in any way give them an audience. Hellbanning in this regard isn't my favorite technique, but it seems to work to some degree.
Now that would only be acceptable if its application is flawless. Sadly, from from what we've seen so far, it isn't.
Edit: Just remembered that I wrote a (longer) spiel about this a little while ago http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/re-wordpress-com-foru...
Unfortunately, the Internet, startups, programming, and social media attract all seem to attract narcissistic, megalomaniacal and/or sociopathic types.
While this is fair question for sure not being able to solve a problem (right away) and identifying a problem are two completely different things.
Especially when asked to solve a problem as if it's a question on a test. And the fact that a problem is hard to solve or someone doesn't have an immediate answer doesn't mean there isn't a problem to be solved. Nor does it matter if they have ever run a popular discussion web site either.
In the real world to "solve a problem" such as this would take thought, time and testing all of which a commenter is not going to be able to do a good job of in a "reply" to a question posed here.
Most likely no low hanging fruit of a reply available.
I was asked a few days ago "well what would you have done then if you were Snowden?". As if I'm supposed to be able to come up with or commit to a response that makes sense on the spot. I simply won't do that.
> I'd love to hear how you solve the problem.
You've exemplified the problem perfectly. Next time, don't comment.
Regardless of those considerations, my question is genuine. I see a lot or criticisms here of the technical measures taken to prevent or ameliorate particular issues, expressed by people who have idealistic opinions and points of view, but with zero experience of actually dealing with the problems. That is starting to annoy me more and more, and perhaps that irritation seeped into my reply.
But the point remains. The reply back-off was implemented to help reduce the snarkiness in long threads. My feeling (with no hard evidence) is that it has worked tolerably well. My question is genuine - if this annoys kmfrk, then how has kmfrk dealt with it in the past? If kmfrk has neither experienced it, nor implemented a solution, then I feel the criticism is misplaced.
In conclusion, probably next time I won't comment.
I edit my posts probably 3-5 times after making them to remove spelling mistakes, correct grammar, and make whatever changes are needed (quickly after posting).
This seems to trigger the slowdown after the second or third edit.
I also got hellband a year or two ago for submitting either a few links that made it to front-page - but then were flagged by people for political reasons, or posting a negative-Apple submit (the last non DOA submit) that might have upset a mod (titled "Brokerages Race To Feed Apple To The Muppets").
My comments show up, but all my submits are DOA.
There must be some moderators/admins with axes to grind. I mean, it's friggin' Jacobian, for Pete's sake.
Instead, you get no warning, so you believe your submissions have been accepted, when in fact nobody else can see them. If you click the "New" link you actually see your own submissions, but since nobody else can, they never get any votes.
This is quite deceptive and probably done to keep you interested in the site, until you figure out you have less "rights" than other visitors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning
tldr; unwanted users can't contribute, feel excluded or ignored, then go away.
Especially considering HN isn't the most diverse community on the interwebz and someone might have a different view if they're not a financially-stable heterosexual American white male...
I've run forums and image posting sites before, the trouble isn't finding moderators from the community who will work for free. The trouble is finding ones that won't abuse their power.
In /r/programming on reddit, it was shadowbanned as soon as it was posted. It's pretty frustrating and it's making me want to contribute to HN less.
Going around thinking you're superior because you're connected is just as shallow online as it was for country clubs.
Please actually process ideas if you comment on HN.
The users of those posts aren't necessarily hellbanned - the posts are though. If enough people flag a new story I think it'll automatically be marked dead.
Usually it's just for spammy crap, or stories that aren't very interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155513
I don't think many stories get flagged just on the new page. It's usually domains that are flagged, like buzzfeed.com, huffingtonpost.com, or gawker.com. It sounds like maybe there was a bug in the server today.
In this case, it's part of a policy not to discuss meta-hn issues on hn. If you start a post asking why you were hell banned, or flagging/downvoting, it'll usually get flagged and/or removed.
If this is true, it would be a pretty sad state of affairs.
If such a discussion comes up, it's because of a lack of transparency.
Personally, I think PG is striking a good balance. If you disagree you are, of course, free to go elsewhere and/or start an alternative community, and solve all the problenms in your own way.
Why? Because it's happened to me many times in the past.
I create new accounts often. The thought police cannot stop me.
I often get down-voted for some of my more bone-headed, humorously off-topic or bad faith posts. Well, not _very_ often (generally I'm a good soul) but you get the point.
If you're not making this up and this has happened to you many times then maybe you should consider the possibility that your posts are not adding anything of benefit to the site. I created one account initially and went from there. I have never even felt the need to create an alter-ego, and evil twin or a "posting-while-drunk" safe account.
Hope that helps. Think twice or thrice before you hit the "reply" button.
...such as when your thoughtful posts don't show up because you got hellbanned for a single post the mods/algorithm didn't like. And when considering the odds, it makes sense to create new accounts.