How I was unbanned from Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

How I was unbanned from Hacker News

blog.aha.io

72 pointsbdehaaff51 comments

Hell-banning for anything other than blatant spam or hate speech is reprehensible.

Imagine participating in a community, enjoying your interactions with some bright people, contributing knowledge when you can, when suddenly you find that you've become invisible. After some period of time wondering, you eventually find out that you are invisible.

It's a horrible thing to do to someone. I like many of the HN commenters, and I often learn something from reading what they've written, but I have nothing but disdain for the site itself, its mods, and its creator. They all contribute to doing this to people, though they'll brush it off as necessary automation, necessary for quality control, or some other sociopathic nonsense.

If it wasn't for the quality control, I wouldn't be here.

I wish HN would be more strict, it would drive the quality up even further. I want users to think long and hard about what they are writing and submitting.

HN is a right, not a privilege.

The internet is littered with poorly maintained communities, but HN isn't one of them, by design. If you don't get why these rules exist and you can't understand their purpose, you shouldn't be here.

If it wasn't for the quality control, I wouldn't be here...The internet is littered with poorly maintained communities, but HN isn't one of them, by design.

Quality control and ruthless modding are certainly required - Kuro5hin is a great example of such a community which turned quickly into a hellhole when spammers and insincere trolls took over.

However I've seen plenty of hellbanned people on HN who had a completely innocuous comment history - no insults or bad behaviour - just one day their comments started being hidden. Such an extreme punishment should be reserved for spammers and people who use gross insults in arguments IMO, not imposed automatically as it appears to be.

There are many other more effective ways to police a community, including just commenting when you think something is out of line, which I think serve HN better and are also part of its quality control.

[EDIT there are even some hellbanned people in this discussion]

Do the reverse, switch HN to invite only.

Given the number of HN users, that may work now but invite-only communities really only reenforce a community. It's difficult for outsiders to get in.

One such example is https://lobste.rs/ -- An invite-only version of HN. It currently suffers from not having enough discourse. One reason may be the small community size.

I think the lack of discourse is considered a feature by the lobste.rs community, as the easiest way to keep its signal/noise ratio high.

> from not having enough discourse.

Actually that is my point, I was being facetious.

Don't we all know bad players though who misbehave every so often, so even invite only would work for so long (and that assumes there would be enough interesting content in the first place to keep people coming back.

I agree with you. I think folks react to the fact that there are a set of rules that are unknown, but the penalties for violating them are harsh.

I don't think it's reprehensible. Any user can from their settings select the option 'show dead' to see hellbanned comments/submissions. Often, you'll see people alert those hellbanned if they deserve to know. This is a free service open to the public with almost no effort required to post, so I understand why this type of moderation is done.

People who are used to seeing upvotes on their comments and submissions will notice when they have a long period of no interaction with the community and probably figure out they've been hellbanned. I'd guess most hellbanned users (who deserve it) find it comforting that their comments stopped getting downvotes and angry responses, so it might even be more humane moderation then letting the community rage at them.

You're certainly willing to do a lot of rationalization in order to support the status quo.

Except this "type of moderation" is harmful, not beneficial. When someone gets shadow banned, they go back and make a new account, and continue behaving exactly as before. If you want to improve behavior, you need to tell people what they did wrong so they can change. Shadow bans are only useful for people who are deliberately being disruptive, not for people who worded something in a way mods disliked, or posted an opinion mods didn't like.

Telling people how they need to behave doesn't improve behavior. It's not like telling them what they did wrong will make them have an epiphany and understand the sort of incomprehensibly bad posting they're doing. You have to be pretty consistently bad to get irrevocably hellbanned, and telling people what they did wrong instead of banning them, if it has an impact on their behavior, would tend to make them skate along at the boundary and lower the quality of the forum anyway. If those people had good comments to make, they'd have already been making them.

I agree. It would be helpful to be notified that you did something wrong and what it was. The rule was not published, so I had no idea that I needed to diversify my posts.

He wasn't hellbanned. So your rant is misplaced.

I ask this with kindness and no ill will -- because I am curious. If that is true, than why are you still using the site and contributing comments? There are tons of great places to read newsworthy and interesting articles.

Deleted comment

That seems a big harsh. I am not sure it is that black and white.

Why wouldn't I?

As I said, I enjoy many commenters, have learned a great deal from them, and have enjoyed my conversations with them.

This is at odds with my very negative view of the site itself, its founder, and how it's moderated. Also, I have to go out of my way to ignore the enormous amounts of link-bait and startup bubble fluff. In fact, I would say that the articles themselves offer almost no value, but some of the discussions are highly educational.

All that banning did was waste a good amount of my time until I figured out what had happened, create a lot of ill-will, and then I made a new account.

Always email if you feel you have been banned. A few months ago, I posted something stupid and was down voted. Almost right afterwards, the site became extremely slow but was fast when I was logged out. I thought I had been slow banned. After emailing, I was reassured my account was fine and the slowness was caused by garbage collection & caching issues.

On many sites, an unauthenticated user gets content faster since it's much easier to very aggressively cache unauthenticated content -- since there is usually no user-specific page customization (e.g., so the entire response can be easily cached via varnish). Additionally, if the user cannot modify state, the cache can be made more incoherent without loss (e.g., such that the cache is only flushed every few minutes; unauthenticated users don't often notice the stale data).

In some situations under high load, the same response from Varnish (which may only available to unauthenticated users) may be an order of magnitude faster than the application server, even if they're co-located on the same physical machine.

Thanks for the additional details on why the slowness might have been experienced.

I was most likely banned for making a negative comment about a mindless HBR article. The site was being flooded with them at the time.

The consensus in the commenting community was that you shouldn't downvote people without explaining why. The rule of the site is that you shouldn't complain about posts. The two are at odds, and personally I favor what the community wants, not what the site overlords dictate.

Good point. It always makes sense to ask. I was just surprised that I heard back so quickly.

And you're continuing to post links to the same domain? Brave sir, very brave.

Since being unbanned this account has submitted items from businessweek, quora, yahoo and mashable.

Thanks for pointing that out. I am working for better balance now that I understand the guideline.

And many other too. Lesson learned.

For appropriate reasons, I know the 'ghost' ban thresholds are secret (otherwise it would be incredibly easy for script kiddies to simply game).

However, the hacker in me is almost curious enough to see how far I could "poke the lion with a stick". If I had more time, creating a few dozen accounts ... etc

Then I think about how I would engineer such a system and try and keep it as automated as possible. I'm sure its well written enough to threshold on some dynamic curve based on incoming traffic.

And, whilst variety is the spice of life and all that, if you are a prolific (and popular) poster, should people care if you self promote. If each of your posts is a winner, generates great readership figures and 'likes' and spikes conversation, why not allow this? So, I'd want to deviate down a score based on popularity. Then there is frequency of posting, and comment karma ...

At the end of the day whenever there is a threshold, there will be edge cases where people are the wrong side of judgment line. Banning is a digital thing, and reputation is analog. I'm glad that hn seems to have a response appeal system.

Yes, very true. But sometimes banning is analog as well. I am just glad that the problem was admitted/resolved and I am back posting stories and comments.

I wonder if a more appropriate title wouldn't be "How I Got Banned in the First Place". How the author got unbanned isn't really as helpful to know as what he did to get banned to begin with.

It seems a lot of people don't know how to find out whether they're shadowbanned, or how to get out of the HN purgatory if they are. I can see the value of this post.

I've tweeted a few people before to let them know of their fate when their comment history didn't seem worthy of a ban and I think in all cases I've had to point out that an email needs to be sent to have the ban looked at.

> It seems a lot of people don't know how to find out whether they're shadowbanned, or how to get out of the HN purgatory if they are.

Agreed, and as others mention, a little more transparency would be nice. When I signed up, I think I posted less than 10 comments, all perfectly civil and in-line, before someone informed me I appeared to be hellbanned (and was kind enough to comment on it and say they looked at my comment history and didn't see any reason). I don't know what heuristic I triggered or if it was simply a mistake, but my initial reaction was that banning was so arbitrary and capricious around here that I almost just shrugged and said, "ok, whatever, I'm not particularly invested in this site," and left. Instead I emailed info@ycombinator.com to ask why I was hellbanned, and I never got a response, but soon afterwards, the ban was lifted. I still have no idea what happened, and although I seem to have managed to find the right tone for comment threads, the machinations of the site and its rules remain shadowy and cryptic, so I have no idea if I'm eventually going to be banned again.

Edit: haha, I just went back and looked, and it was you who was so kind. Thanks, parent! :)

Oh yeah, it was too! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4244627 No problem at all!

You are more kind than most. I think the cruel part is that everything appears normal - but your are totally invisible. Google analytics was key to seeing an issue immediately.

>...I think the cruel part is that everything appears normal - but your are totally invisible...

Indeed. I cannot for the life of me understand the logic behind this behavior. If you've been banned or had a comment killed, it would be a basic courtesy to provide some sort of notification/reason in your profile.

ag80: That's one of the motivations behind lobsters. I think if HN were a little more transparent, it would mitigate the cold feeling of being hell banned. When I thought I had been shadow banned, it was like being banished from the internet. It really felt horrible.

Knowing that I'd have gotten a warning/notification means if the site is slow, I'd brush it off as high latency. Now every time the site is a little slow, I panic and think I've been slow banned.

You can always just look at your comment history while you're logged out. If things are missing, you've been shadowbanned.

I just realized I meant to say "slow banned".

ag80, you appear to be hellbanned (ironically enough). Couldn't tell why from a glance at your commment history.

Indeed, I was. An apparent false spam positive from my lone submission.

Yes, good point. The banning based on posting links to the same url is the interesting part.

Based on your point, I actually just added a line to the beginning of the post (second paragraph) with the alternative headline. Thanks.

Are threshold bans permanent? I had like 1k karma and got banned out of the blue. Reasons were never given, so I am guessing it is automated.

Did you try to email and ask? I bet you would get a response. The email address is listed in the blog post.

Disappointed. I was expecting drama, controversy, action. Instead it's just a routine thing and there's no intriguing story of banning. No redemption, slander, betrayal or revenge. Or anything juicy at all.

Those highly technical posts give me such a headache at the end of the day.

This post could help people that may write the highly technical posts and only submit their own content. If they were to get banned, you'd miss their great information.

Me too. That's why I write them.

Censorship is all the rage in America.

That might be true. But typically no one steps in to correct a wrong so quickly.

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