Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>Oh, good grief. "Grovelling in front of the abuser?" I've been doing this job since October 2012 and I can't remember a single case where we refused a polite request, or even most rude ones.

Groveling is the perception that some of the people (including me) have when deciding what to do when they get shadow-banned. So I just end up dropping the old account and any reputation it may have gained over its lifetime to start over.

I understand that it's dramatic, but from the outside it feels like a process of begging for forgiveness for committing some infraction you don't even understand. To rub salt in the wound, we aren't even given the dignity of knowing when we have uttered words that violate the secret book of acceptable comments. We just have to infer after a sudden decline in comment engagement that we have been shadow-banned. This is infuriating to say the least. For a site to have a sanctioned method of giving regular users a permanent punishment which causes them to pour effort into providing comments that land muted is repulsive to me.

I apologize for ranting, but I have yet to see a strong logically sound defense of this practice. It's one of the worst 'fuck-you' features I've seen a site implement towards its users that make critical comments. Critical discourse is what makes this site great! Unaccountable shadow-bans chill critical discourse regardless of their intent.

I beg you to reconsider the practice in its current form. As I mentioned elsewhere, someone intentionally trolling will verify that they aren't shadow-banned anyway. The people shadow-banning hurts the worst are the ones who don't expect to be shadow-banned (i.e. genuine commenters).

Okay, I hear you and appreciate that you put some real feeling into what you wrote there. That's genuinely helpful—more than you might think—and quite rare.

If it's true that what people really need is feedback about what they're doing that's inappropriate for HN, and if we'd only give it to them then they would respond by adjusting their behavior, then I have to agree with you: we should find a way to give that feedback. It would be a clear path to improving the site and correcting some of its dysfunction. I'm not sure that it is true, but I hope it is and am willing to test the idea. But we'd need a way to do it that would scale.

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but:

> People who get banned can either start again with a new account or can write a short email showing understanding of why they got banned and asking to be unbanned.

The issue people are bringing up is, what happens when the banee doesn't know why they got banned (not to mention that they got banned)?

For what it's worth, I usually point out Metafilter as a site that seem to do moderation pretty well. There are of course a number of important differences in the way the sites work, but I bet there are a great many lessons that could be shared in both directions.

People send email to those they think have been incorrectly banned.

Thus the importance of correct email addresses in the user's profile.

It is not rare. I'm not putting the poster you are replying to down in any way when I say his sentiment is widely shared, and widely commented on.

I have no idea, really, what is 'acceptable' to post here. There is no informative FAQ, there are no examples, there is no guidance coming from the owners, and so on. Every time I post I then watch my karma to see if I am being voted up or down. But I don't even know if that is measuring what I think it measures. Would I see it go down prior to a hell ban? (btw: we all call it 'hell ban' - does that not convey the frustration and dislike of this feature) I don't know. It is all just a fog of assumptions. As you post and read here you start to pick up some of the acquired wisdom.

I have mixed feelings about posting here. Fault my personality if you want, but I care somewhat if I get banned or not. Certainly, if my posting style is likely to get me banned then I don't want to waste my time posting here. So, I watch, and wonder, and fumble about.

It's not nice.

What I meant was that I got a meaningful emotional signal from hueving's comment which I usually don't get when I read complaints about HN banning. That's rare, in my experience, and helpful.

People can find out why they were banned by emailing us. That's been true for a long time. Also true is that we routinely unban them as long as they give us reason to believe that they won't keep doing whatever it was.

What I do think is that we need a better, finer-grained, more proactive feedback mechanism for informing people when their comment crosses the line. If we get that right, it should not only assuage the hurt feelings we're talking about, but improve the quality of the comment threads too.

But this is harder than it sounds. HN has some specific conditions, and we're not going to do anything that violates those. We're also not going to transplant any system that has worked well on another site—systems don't transplant. So what we are going to do first is think about this for a while.

That's your problem right there: you take decisions based on emotions and feelings so that's what you value in a discussion. This is wrong and you should listen to reason instead.

I have emotions, but made no decision based on them. What I said we'd do is think.

In my view, emotion and reason need one another to function properly, especially in human situations and probably anywhere.

I, too, dislike the ever-present possibility of me being banned and not knowing it, causing me to waste time writing earnest comments that go into a black hole. I’ve thought of a change that might assuage fears like mine while still allowing you to use hellbans to deter trolls: using separate types of bans depending on the likelihood of a user’s troll-ness.

I don’t have any data about trolls, but perhaps if you looked at your data you might find that people rarely turn into trolls if they have at least a certain amount of karma points, or if they have been on the site for at least a certain amount of time. If you find such a pattern, you could make it so that when those users write a trollish comment and should be banned for it, they are actually informed of the ban instead of silently hellbanned. But if you ban a user whose karma or time-on-site suggests a higher chance of being a troll looking for a reaction, you can still hellban them silently.

This policy would mean that long-time users would know not to fear hellbanning after they pass the publically-stated point. It would let them interact with the site without that slight fear that their comments are going to waste, because they know the site would visibly prevent them from writing comments if they’ve been banned. But the policy would still let you use hellbanning, which is supposedly very effective, as a deterrent for trolls. I hope that there actually is a correlation between likelihood-to-be-a-troll and some combination of karma and account age that you can base this policy on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com