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Comment by was_hellbanned | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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