Comment by logn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logn | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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