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Comment by danielweber | Hacker News Reader

I heard about a guy getting hellbanned for flagging all but one of the "Steve Jobs is dead" stories on the day Steve Jobs died. Each time my finger hovers over the "flag" button I wonder ". . . is this really worth the hassle?" Then I close the tab and go off somewhere else.

(I've flagged probably 10 things total.)

EDIT: jlgreco corrects me. The guy I was thinking of was flag-banned, not hell-banned.

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I know some people lost their ability to flag while doing exactly that (the 'flag' link is removed entirely when that happens, the removal of the ability isn't invisible to the user it happens to), but I am unaware of anybody being hellbanned for it.

I can no longer flag because I flagged every inappropriate political post on the front page for a couple days. (It was a pretty bad stretch). I knew it wouldn't help much but it made me feel better. As a result I was flag-banned.

I'm guessing that if you're banned from flagging, then the political posts weren't inappropriate, but your behaviour was.

Or it is just a crude "this person flagged too often" filter, and he was actually being helpful and was punished for it.

I was flagbanned because I flag all the blatant content marketing posts. Of which there are many, so that likely tripped a switch.

I used to check the New page for spam and content-free posts, and flag obvious stuff. Then one day I lost flagging.

I believe that if you flag an item that then becomes popular it counts against you. If you flag a story that has a strong voter-ring or sock-puppet gang then, guess what: You end up being on the losing end and the sock-puppets win.

Such is life.

I guess I was flag-banned. I can't see the flag link anywhere, and I seem to remember it was there before. Must be that one post recently where I expressed a libertarian political view :)

I wanted to do this for the google privacy settings change, did 4 links about it really need to be on the front page?

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