Comment by kintamanimatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kintamanimatt | Hacker News Reader

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For those without showdead on, there's an insightful comment from beedogs:

My guess (and he intimates this in his comment about backdoors in Chinese products) is that the US government asked him to basically break his entire system so they could do MitM attacks.

The conversation probably went something like this:

    USG: Install this machine in your datacenter.  Route all traffic through it.  
    Accept installation of this new fiber demarc and allow us access to 
    configure this new router.  You do not need to know where this 
    traffic is going.  If you refuse, we'll slap you with a contempt order 
    and throw you in federal prison.  If you tell anyone about this, we will 
    slap you with a contempt order and throw you in federal prison.
    
    LL: Get fucked.  I'll shut everything down instead.

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Why beedogs is shadowbanned is beyond me. A quick glance through his comment history doesn't indicate he's done anything to deserve it.

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Hey beedogs: I can't reply to you directly because you're hellbanned. Send an email to PG. I'm not usually a fan of posting people's contact information, but in this case it's everywhere anyway - pg [at] ycombinator.com

The official way to appeal is to ask info@ycombinator.com about it. I did that once and they said I got banned by accident.

[Edit: ignore this part, it's wrong] If anyone gets shadowbanned (which can happen for automated reasons), use this link with your IP. https://news.ycombinator.com/unban?ip=ipaddress PG made this link as an automated appeal, he says it only works once.

Emailing is definitely the way to go. I've emailed PG about a post that got flagged to death and he was fairly quick about unbanning it.

I don't think that link is for un-hellbanning an account. I think that's if you have a bot that messes up, or doesn't respect the rate limiting expressed in the site's robots.txt, and the IP of the bot gets blocked. If it were for un-shadowbanning, the username would be asked for rather than the IP address. Having said that, I forgot about that unban link -- thanks!

Just to confirm, you are spot on - the link has nothing to do with hellbanning. But I guess the most common cause is if you restore a browser session with lots of HN pages.

And I suppose a busy shared connection with lots of people reading HN all at once!

Yeah, I'd like to know why I'm shadowbanned, too. This is the first I'd heard of it.

Can someone at least let me know what the hell I did?

Welcome back!

thanks -- and to whoever sorted this out: thank you as well.

If the government said "comply with this order or go to prison" and he said "I'll shut down instead", doesn't that still count as failure to comply? Is that like me burning down my house in response to a search warrant?

My bet is the government told him to modify his codebase to capture passwords at the point where they're in cleartext and gave him x days to do it. He didn't refuse to do it, but closed up shop instead so he didn't have to. I doubt the government can compel him to continue running a business he wants to close down. It'd be like having a broken taillight and being given 15 days to fix it. If the person took the car off the road, they'd not be compelled to make the repair.

Perhaps they can demand he continue to do business (although it seems like a pretty tenuous request), or perhaps they can blackmail him with threats of criminal prosecution lest he keep his show on the road. Who knows?

If they asked him to produce customer data and he deletes instead, then he is in violation. If they asked him to install some middleware for all his traffic, he can just say "Sure, but I don't have any traffic anymore".

He could shut down external access, deploy changes to capture plain text passwords, then turn everything off. Technically he's complied...

FYI someone sorted this out (not sure who, but thanks!)

Thanks for the heads-up!

replying to beedogs because I can't directly:

You made this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183189 and one of the admins arbitrarily decided that you needed silent punishment. nice eh?

That trademark HN moderation at work.

beedogs, you can probably send an e-mail to the powers that be to restore your account. If they won't, then at least you've got a new story worth sharing.

There is a fair bit of irony at play huh? All content being observed. Punishment dishes out arbitrarily and without explanation. Liberty (speech) curtailed. And this is one of the favorite platforms for pro Snowden discussions!

And all because of a legitimate policy goal of preventing the destruction of an insightful commenting community due to the chaos that would ensue if unrestrained posting were always allowed.

Ironic indeed.

Right. To those who support the policies they make total sense. Without them there'd be unknown chaos. Good add.

For the umpteenth time, moderation is not censorship. HN is akin to a private club not a country that you are born into forced to live in. And furthermore, the chaos is anything but unknown. It is mob/troll rule ala slashdot/reddit/4chan and every other online community that grows beyond a critical mass.

To Censor: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable.

So this is censoring speech. They have the right to do it as they're a private entity. But don't confuse their right to censor with the definition of censorship. I see that happen a lot.

Wow. Fantastic. A flip comment is hardly worthy of a hellban. What gives, admins?

(For what it's worth, that was in reference to the "NSA to cut sysadmins by 90 percent" story from yesterday. As a SA, I can tell you right now that if someone decided to increase my workload by 1000 percent, I'd walk, too.)

For that alone? Cant be. Really? Surely there must be something more than that alone.

Granted, its not the most useful post, probably meant to amuse, but a hellban?

As someone who ate a bunch of hellbans, even subtracting my personal learning process, I would say posting on HN is kind of like turtle eggs hatching and trying to crawl across the beach into the ocean before the birds snatch them up. It seems as if oldtimers can sometimes post things newbies would never get away with, and newbies get treated extremely harshly for making a slightly wrong move too early on.

edit: sorry, I didn't realize we're talking about an acount that's over 5 years old... so none of what I said applies here, and I'm just as puzzled as the next guy.

turn on showdead and you'll find dozens of other cases where people have been banned for similarly egregious reasons. In some cases people go on posting for years without knowing their posts are dead. it's the most horrible aspect of HN.

I've seen mentions of of this but didn't realize that people weren't even being notified. That's fucked up and I really think this policy needs to be reevaluated.

I was also surprised to find it here. Afaik the name (and popularization as a forum-management technique) comes from SomethingAwful, but it fits the culture there.

I've always been kind of confused about that... after a few comments, if you see they never get a single upvote, and never get a single reply... wouldn't it quickly become pretty obvious?

Okay so what about this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6191092

People should post some contact information in their HN bio. I agree, this is the ugliest part of HN, and it's sometimes nice to be able to give someone a heads up as to what's happened so they don't go on wasting their time posting comments that most people won't see.

Granted, there are other cases like losethos (or whatever his screenname is) that are repeat offenders and deserve to be hellbanned. (Yeah, I know his case is due to mental illness.)

My email address is in my HN bio. Never received a thing.

If that's the case it seems your profile got blanked when you got shadowbanned. Here's a screenshot I took of it: http://i.imgur.com/KbS3heF.png

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It's just occurred to me that you're probably referring to the email field, not the about field. Anything in the email field isn't public, and I'm under the impression you don't get notified when you're hellbanned, which is pretty much how it gets its name! If, on the other hand you put your email address or other contact details in the about field, and they're no longer there, then that's a different matter. For example, my email address is in the email field of my profile but it's not public. The only public information that's there right now is my Twitter name.

Wow. I'm trying to think of something more to justify this comment, but "wow" is all I can come up with. There's moderating, and there' being kinda inhumane :(

You're right - I meant the email field. Sorry about that; I didn't know it wasn't publicly viewable until I checked.

There are other options. For example, if someone's status = hellbanned, them change the header bar to reflect it. It's simple and doesn't require anything to be sent out.

that would just be a ban - the hell in hellban refers to the fact that you don't even know that you're a victim.

Yeah, to add to this further, the reason is to slow down the user so it takes them a while (if ever) to figure out they're banned, otherwise they'd just create a new account which would be more work for the mods and would drag down the quality of comments and content submitted. (Of course, this assumes the person being banned is being banned for justifiable reasons.)

Interesing. Thank you for the info.

call them out in the thread, at least it highlights the issue to other people, even if the person in question doesn't see your post.

That's what I did this time. I tried to Google some contact details for the guy (Twitter account, etc), but who knew there were bee costumes for dogs? His profile was blank too.

Yes this happened to me, despite being polite and courteous. Was very fucking annoyed.

It's unethical. Surely locking a thread is ok, but allowing people to toil away without any remark is just plain wrong regardless of who it is or what they say.

I mean even 4chan manages to reach a higher ethical plateau than HN on the moderation front.

Pragmatic response: If you can, put some way of contacting you in your HN profile. Conscientious HN readers will send you mail if you're posting thoughtful comments but are hellbanned. You can then contact the admins, and I've found they are typically amenable to restoring your account.

Couldn't you also just occasionally check to see if your comments show when you are logged out?

Sure. But that's a pain and easy to forget. :-)

What? That's not even something worthy of a hellban!

Out of curiousity, does anyone know who has the ability to hellban and, if so, are they themselves evaluated?

Mods. Could be PG, could be someone PG has elected to be a mod. The mods don't make themselves known, as far as I've seen.

From the FAQ: [0]

> Who are the editors?

> About 30 YC alumni. They can kill stories and edit the titles, and in extreme cases (e.g. spamming or deliberate trolling) ban users.

Are the bans evaluated? Well, no, apparently not automatically. But they can be manually reviewed by sending a nice email to PG.

[0] http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Deleted comment

I've never been warned and I've been a user for five years. Very few of my comments are ever even voted down.

I think you're just wrong here.

First they came for the PHP users, and I didn't speak out, because I did not program in PHP.

Then they came for the Android users, and I didn't speak out, because I did not own an Android device.

Then they came for the Opera users, and I didn't speak out, because seriously, who the hell uses Opera today?

I think maybe you'll think twice next time before making a emotional quip with no actual content. If I was a mod, there would be a lot more hellbans being handed out in this thread.

Is it socially acceptable to shun someone forever because they were impolite in conversation once?

Why should he have special privileges? I got none in the several times I've been banned. If you don't like the game, go somewhere else (reddit) to play.

There has been actual well known engineers who have been hellbanned from HN. They didn't get special treatment either. If you want a nepotistic forum, make one yourself and see how well it does...

Your response to being banned seems to be to see other people banned.

the link is dead.. do I need certain level of karma to see it?

turn showdead on in your profile. then whenever you see other people who've been banned unreasonably, tell them!

Turn on showdead in your settings.

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