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I've been hellbanned here on HN on at least three different IP addresses and accounts...that I am aware of. Probably more. In each case nothing I'd ever said w

I've been hellbanned here on HN on at least three different IP addresses and accounts...that I am aware of. Probably more. In each case nothing I'd ever said would be considered trolling by any rational observer. Here on HN, however, as with most communities where you start to recognize the regulars (tptacek, raganwald, etc), "trolling" is redefined to simply mean "going against the grain". There was one discussion that I participated where I predicted that Apple would see declining profit margins due to increased competition. Remarkably this completely benign, seemingly obvious observation saw me declared a troll, and shortly thereafter yet another account was hellbanned from HN (whatever the mechanism -- is this the verdict of a bored PG, or has he anointed some particularly under-employed members to apply it? -- it is horribly broken). Troll is, more often than not, a term used to circle the wagons.

deleted 15y ago
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vaksel 15y ago
what does hellbanned look like on HN? Can't login? Can't post? Can post, but noone can see it?
- tshtf 15y ago
  You can post, but by default no one besides you can see it. To the poster, it just appears as a normal comment. Turn on "showdead" to see posts from hellbanned users.
  - kaybe 15y ago
    So how would I find out this has happened to me? (Besides the obvious - no answers to my comments - of course.)
    - hucker 15y ago
      I can confirm that you are NOT hellbanned. One way to see if you are is logging out and see if your comment is still there. If it is not, you are banned.
    - pazimzadeh 15y ago
      You are not hellbanned, but you won't see this unless I'm not hellbanned.
      - pgsucks 15y ago
        Well, I am hellbanned.
    - dchuk 15y ago
      I had a hellbanned account before this one, and the other thing I noticed is that each page load took forever (10+ seconds) instead of the basically instantaneous loading of my current account. A very passive-aggressive way to annoy someone enough to stop posting in my opinion.
- Cushman 15y ago
  The last one. All of your comments are dead, but you don't know it. If you have showdead on, sometimes you'll see perfectly reasonable comments that are inexplicably dead-- this is why.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- kstenerud 15y ago
  Anything you post can't be seen by others unless they've turned on dead posts in their configuration, in which case anything you post has [dead] prefixed on it. Though it happens less than in other forums, wagon circling is definitely a persistent problem on HN. I believe it's only further exacerbated by the fact that downvoted comments are displayed in a difficult to read color, meaning that downvotes can effectively censor things the majority doesn't like, regardless of the merit of the argument. It's not as bad as on Reddit, where groups of people form downvote cabals to actively censor specific users or ideas, but it's still problematic.
  - billswift 15y ago
    Interestingly, since it is easy to highlight and read them, I almost always read downvoted comments. Even in a post, like this one, with lots of comments, where I start to skim them, but I still read most of the downvoted ones.
    - kstenerud 15y ago
      I do too; it's just annoying to have to manually highlight something in order to read it. In general, a 1-line downvoted post is downvoted for good reason. For multiline posts, it's far more often a good post that people didn't like for other reasons. Those are the ones I take steps to manually highlight and read, and then upvote if I think it was downvoted for the wrong reasons.
- eldude 15y ago
  It doesn't look like anything to the banned individual apparently, as I just now discovered that my account was banned. Awesome. http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475
scott_s 15y ago
Can you point to the actual posts? Every time I've seen a hellbanned account, I have agreed with the decision. In the interest of full disclosure, my suspicion is that the way you expressed these opinions ran counter to the kind of discussion people want to see on HN. I may be wrong, of course, which is why I'd like to see the actual posts.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  Not that I care anymore, but why was this account banned anyway: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ignifero http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ignifero ?
- eldude 15y ago
  > Every time I've seen a hellbanned account, I have agreed with the decision. I'd be curious to get your opinion on my (just discovered) ban: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    ALL CAPS alls warrants a ban. That said, hellbans are fucking despicable. They might be the proper way to deal with spambots, but for contributing members they are as far as I am concerned incredibly unethical.
    - mixmastamyk 15y ago
      I agree. I used reddit daily for several years until a weirdo passive-agressive moderator? replied to one of my comments with profanity and then sabotaged my account in some way. Wasted a lot of time and haven't been back there for years, a shame. At least I learn more here, and there are fewer pictures of kittens.
- interlagos 15y ago
  Well here you go -- this account is now hellbanned.
mithaler 15y ago
There was one discussion that I participated where I predicted that Apple would see declining profit margins due to increased competition. Remarkably this completely benign, seemingly obvious observation saw me declared a troll, and shortly thereafter yet another account was hellbanned from HN. I'm curious--can you paste the text of that comment here if you still have it? It's possible that, for example, it was your tone that got you downvoted, not your message. Or it could have been the community perceiving you to be ignoring evidence, or any number of other things. In any case, this claim here isn't sufficient for us to judge the fairness of the response.
- gbog 15y ago
  There has been some threads where any comment that was not a praise of Steve Jobs and Apple was downvoted. Sometimes I feel fragmentation on HN, was is upvoted in a thread is downvoted in another.
  - einhverfr 15y ago
    I have watched posts of my own go upvoted then downvoted then up voted then down voted more or less randomly. FWIW I do NOT think people should downvote based on disagreement. I think downvotes should be sparsely used and I personally upvote even people I disagree with.
    - gbog 15y ago
      Well, maybe, but now I am using thread upvote mostly to promote themes I like to see on HN, and comment downvotes to push down thanks, me-too, or otherwise empty answers.
teej 15y ago
In the last 6 months I've been running an experiment. An experiment to make Hacker News better. Because I felt Hacker News was going to shit in several ways and I felt like I could help. I couldn't stop naive newbies from making dumb comments, but I could stop fanboyism and groupthink. I decided that I was going to take a different approach to commenting. In essence, I wanted to be like DHH - highly opinionated, strongly worded, and unafraid to call people out. To ensure comment integrity, I stuck only to topics in which I strongly felt I was in the right. patio11, joshu, tptacek and pg were some of the people I spoke out against. I made the argument that those people were flat-out wrong. But not just that, I clarified -why- they were wrong in a reasoned way. And that was the key - explaining why. It turns out that people DID care about the truth. People WERE willing to hear out an alternate view and they voted with their upvotes. I was able to move my karma from 3.5k to 5k and move my average from 7 to 14 per comment. Many of my comments took a very contrarian view to the HN status quo. Many of them were directly targeted at the "HN elite". All of them took their share of downvotes from those who thought my comments didn't add value. But in the end, they were the most successful comments I've ever made. So don't lose hope! There is a way out of groupthink. But it takes hard work, great communication, and an academic view of persuasion. In the end, I think reasoned and rational discussion is what makes HN great, let's get back to that.
- tshtf 15y ago
  In the last 6 months I conducted a different experiment. I turned on "showdead" and looked through the posting history of users with dead posts. About a quarter of the time, I would have disagreed with the hellbanning. If you're going to ban a user, you might as well be honest and tell them up front.
  - nirvana 15y ago
    I have showdead turned on as well. It breaks my heart to see these comments from people who are trying to contribute. I don't go look up all their past history, but I'd say %75 of the comments are attempts to contribute to the conversation (even if they aren't great attempts or original) and about %25 are just comments that don't really add anything, but aren't really offensive or spammy or inappropriate.
stfu 15y ago
Steven Colbert might be the best example of how good trolling can lead to very enlightening statements. In an ideal case it could even bring a self-discovery in the form of a Socratian dialogue that illustrates certain "taking things too serious" positions. Additionally I think one should draw a line between trolling and flaming. Just some "you suck" comments are not making a troll a troll.
jcampbell1 15y ago
The fact that you consider the observation obvious, is a sign that you were possibly trolling. You were probably being intellectually too lazy to make your point without resorting using tactics like calling your own opinions seemingly obvious. It is not obvious that increased competition leads to declining margins. Often increased competition validates the market, and increases consumer demand far more than the effect on pricing. I have seen it in my own industry, where our sales increase when a competitor launches a big ad campaign.
dasil003 15y ago
> Troll is, more often than not, a term used to circle the wagons. I think this is true by definition, after all, if the majority are trolling then it's culturally acceptable and you have 4chan. But I think if you are being intellectually honest you need to be open to the possibility that maybe you were acting like a dick on occasion. I've dealt with heavy duty trolling before, and it's a common refrain that the admins are "fascist" and that they are simply "censoring" unpopular opinions. All the while saying things that would get their asses kicked if said in public. For the unskilled troll their behavior is obvious, but the skilled troll can make himself indistinguishable from someone who just has a mild form of digital Aspergers. Often the only goal is to piss you off and waste your time. So in the battle against trolls, detached and ruthless action is often necessary because anything else allows them to win. If there is some collateral damage because one's opinion is just too "different", probably the best thing is to move on to a different forum, or just start a blog. Then you can post your opinions and gain even more notoriety with "the regulars" possibly defending you with the backing of their mighty reputation. Witness Ted Dziuba, that cocky prick would for sure be hellbanned if he waded into HN, but he doesn't have to because everyone reads his posts directly.
tokenadult 15y ago
I'll disagree with you in part while agreeing in part. I invite onlookers to apply the rubric from pg's essay "How to Disagree" http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html to rate how well I do in disagreeing here. You write, Here on HN, however, as with most communities where you start to recognize the regulars (tptacek, raganwald, etc), "trolling" is redefined to simply mean "going against the grain." I disagree with this, because I have openly disagreed at least with tptacek, and certainly with other users who have higher karma totals than I have and have been on Hacker News longer than I have, and yet I have never been hellbanned. I have seen even more open, pointed, and frequent disagreements with some of the "regulars" here from some of the other regulars, but those accounts are still alive and well. I have used the same username here, and only this one username here, during all the 1122 days since I formed my user account. To the best of my knowledge and belief, each of my posts has been visible to users since it was posted, and the majority of my comments have stayed above 0 net karma ever since they were posted. I agree with you that expressions of opinion that disagree with the joint opinion of the most active HN participants can result in individual net downvotes of comments. Before I got here, it was declared that the site founder is okay with participants downvoting to express disagreement with comments, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 and when I lose karma on a net basis with a particular comment, I look at how the comment was written, and think about how I could make a comment that disagrees with prevailing opinion be more persuasive the next time. (Another user who has replied to you reports experiments in doing this, and I will look at the examples found in the past comments by that user to see how it is done.) Once in a while, if an issue is important enough to me, I'll openly (and, I hope, respectfully and thoughtfully) disagree, and figure that such occasions when I burn through karma is what karma is worth accumulating for. To sum up, I agree with the proposition that some comments here are downvoted solely to express disagreement. The art of writing comments is to figure out how to express disagreement and still appeal to disagreeing readers as a thoughtful participant in intellectual discussion. On the other hand, I don't think most users here flag comments for disagreement, but rather for blatant violation of the site guidelines. I disagree with the proposition that anyone has been hellbanned solely for posting comments that are in factual disagreement with majority opinion here. I see plenty of live accounts that manage to openly express disagreement frequently, and I possess one. AFTER EDIT: I note, entirely with amusement, that this comment is bouncing up and down in karma score just now. Whatever, I'm just trying to point to some reasons to think about the issue differently from the opinion expressed in the parent comment. Whether you the reader agree or not is up to you. AFTER FURTHER EDIT, RELATING TO COMMENT REPLYING TO THIS COMMENT: Thank you for your reply. I agree that it is logically correct to say that pointing to accounts that survive despite disagreement is not an airtight proof that no accounts have been hellbanned for disagreement. On the other hand, my general point is that I don't see any affirmative evidence for the extraordinary claim that this site is moderated with swift and frequent hellbanning for disagreement as a routine part of the moderation policy. I join the other users who have already said, "link, please?" to follow up statements of the nature of "In each case nothing I'd ever said would be considered trolling by any rational observer," so that we can all see just what the problem was. I had showdead on for most of 2010 and 2011, and I never felt, as I read dead posts, that users who don't see dead posts are missing much from the thousands of posts here on Hacker News. The way to get a reality check on this statement, of course, is to turn on showdead and see what dead posts look like day after day after day on a variety of subjects in a variety of threads.
eldude 15y ago
I'm absolutely shocked and disgusted to be be reading this discussion regarding being "hellbanned" only to discover that my account in fact has been hellbanned for the past 1.5 yrs without even knowing it! http://news.ycombinator.org/threads?id=CrabDude http://news.ycombinator.org/threads?id=CrabDude * enable showdead in your profile to read my comments As you can see from my comments and contributions, most are extremely well reasoned and often entirely unique and invaluable contributions to a given conversation that to my frustration were inexplicably never upvoted or commented on, without any real insight as to why. I honestly am in shock and beyond frustrated that so much of my efforts and attempts to edify and contribute have been undermined by something that is explicitly allowed in comment guidelines. [1] Specifically, the comment that is apparently responsible for my hellban, was on a post that linked to MY NodeKnockout entry which both won the competition category and received over 60 votes to end up on the front page: HEY ALL! REMEMBER TO VOTE FOR US! WE'RE TRYING TO WIN THE INNOVATION CATEGORY! http://nodeknockout.com/teams/starcraft-2-destroyed-my-marri... AND RETWEET THIS WITH #nodeko! =) Worse, this manner of comment is explicitly mentioned as okay in the guidelines. [1] Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." And to any who would comment that my use of all caps elicited my ban, I'd respond by pointing out the use of capitalization is used "for emphasis," [2] in this case, specifically, enthusiasm -- unfortunately making the resulting ban all the more disgusting and frustrating. To any in YC who have control over such things, please unban my account. I would greatly prefer to use it and retain all my contributions than be forced to play wack-a-mole in response to inaccurate rule enforcement. [1] http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps
- ericd 15y ago
  That comment looks a LOT like spam. Hellbanning is necessary, because if a spammer realizes they've been banned overtly, they'll just create a new account and keep on spamming. You do have a lot of legitimately good comments in that list, though.
  - eldude 15y ago
    While I may even agree with you, the unfortunate fact is that it is not in fact spam and violates no rules or guidelines and suffers only from being overly enthusiastic in a positive and friendly manner. In truth, it is not even "empty" in that it provides an important link to the voting page. At best this is an example of incompetence in the form of a poorly written spam detection algorithm, at worst it represents an admin's lazy disregard for the effects of "hellbanning" on a sincere community.
philwelch 15y ago
It would be helpful if you provided links to your previous accounts, so we could see for ourselves.
anigbrowl 15y ago
I find that kind of hard to believe. I don't hack or even work in the computer industry any more, have got into arguments with almost every long-term member at some point or other, and hold distinctly minority positions on a variety of topics (most often about governance). And heaven knows that I can be as snarky or pompous as anyone else when I've had a bad day. Maybe I'm just lucky, but the admins seem pretty hands off to me.
- jcr 15y ago
  anigbrowl, I enjoy your comments, both on your good days and your bad days. On rare occasions it seems like you may have misread something since your reply comes from a surprising angle, but English is not the first language of everyone, and everyone misreads things on occasion. The good news is when I see something surprising as if things were misread, it means I should reread them to make sure that I didn't misread them.
  - anigbrowl 15y ago
    Why thank you.
shiven 15y ago
The hellbanning is what turned me off commenting and sharing my opinions on HN. With the passage of time, what was once a forum to discuss (and openly dissent) ideas feels like an old boys club ... with a few anointed head goons to keep the order (and teach newcomers a lesson with zealous downvoting and hellbanning), a few ol timers who still act decently in hopes that HN may yet regain its spirit (as they remember it) and the rest of the crowd filled with the usual riff-raff on any web forum who have no idea what HN started off as and will probably never care. PG, HN was (is?) a great idea and a great place and well worth the while. Burned two handles over the years, getting the hang of it, but by then it was no longer the place I liked. I'll keep lurking, at least for now. Good luck.
tripzilch 15y ago
I agree that hellbanning on HN is completely out of control. I've seen people (that otherwise posted useful contributions, before and after) hellbanned for making a rather tasteless joke. The joke was sufficiently tasteless that I can totally see a moderator suspending or even banning that user. But not hellbanning. Not that it's strictly worse or anything, it's just so utterly useless and childish. This user had no idea that anything had happened, and he just kept posting for weeks. All that wasted time! And I'm fairly sure that if a moderator would have just told him "hey we'd rather not have people make jokes about dead children here" the guy would have replied "right, my bad that was out of line, won't happen again" cause the rest of his comments didn't seem very inflammatory or anything. Instead the guy gets no message at all and keeps on posting invisibly. A regular ban would have at least sent some message. ... and then there's these things I've heard about people getting temporary hellbans? So people can come back all butthurt after realizing they've been tricked into invisibly wasting their time? That's the dumbest kind of moderation I've ever heard about, really. A hellban should be forever, or not at all. There is no such thing as a "hell suspension".
interlagos 15y ago
EDIT - Posted the above, and now, yet again, I'm experience 10 second or so page generation delays, which is another of the (the rather pathetic slowban) passive-aggressive ways that HN tries to force conformity. Perhaps it's just coincidental, but a test on another IP had virtually instant response times. EDIT2 - Awesome. Hellbanned as well. For those who see showdead, you now know how HN manages such a coherent, consistent (yet superficial, often wrong, self-congratulatory) opinion.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

vaksel 15y ago

what does hellbanned look like on HN? Can't login? Can't post? Can post, but noone can see it?

tshtf 15y ago
You can post, but by default no one besides you can see it. To the poster, it just appears as a normal comment. Turn on "showdead" to see posts from hellbanned users.
- kaybe 15y ago
  So how would I find out this has happened to me? (Besides the obvious - no answers to my comments - of course.)
  - hucker 15y ago
    I can confirm that you are NOT hellbanned. One way to see if you are is logging out and see if your comment is still there. If it is not, you are banned.
  - pazimzadeh 15y ago
    You are not hellbanned, but you won't see this unless I'm not hellbanned.
    - pgsucks 15y ago
      Well, I am hellbanned.
  - dchuk 15y ago
    I had a hellbanned account before this one, and the other thing I noticed is that each page load took forever (10+ seconds) instead of the basically instantaneous loading of my current account. A very passive-aggressive way to annoy someone enough to stop posting in my opinion.
Cushman 15y ago
The last one. All of your comments are dead, but you don't know it. If you have showdead on, sometimes you'll see perfectly reasonable comments that are inexplicably dead-- this is why.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
kstenerud 15y ago
Anything you post can't be seen by others unless they've turned on dead posts in their configuration, in which case anything you post has [dead] prefixed on it. Though it happens less than in other forums, wagon circling is definitely a persistent problem on HN. I believe it's only further exacerbated by the fact that downvoted comments are displayed in a difficult to read color, meaning that downvotes can effectively censor things the majority doesn't like, regardless of the merit of the argument. It's not as bad as on Reddit, where groups of people form downvote cabals to actively censor specific users or ideas, but it's still problematic.
- billswift 15y ago
  Interestingly, since it is easy to highlight and read them, I almost always read downvoted comments. Even in a post, like this one, with lots of comments, where I start to skim them, but I still read most of the downvoted ones.
  - kstenerud 15y ago
    I do too; it's just annoying to have to manually highlight something in order to read it. In general, a 1-line downvoted post is downvoted for good reason. For multiline posts, it's far more often a good post that people didn't like for other reasons. Those are the ones I take steps to manually highlight and read, and then upvote if I think it was downvoted for the wrong reasons.
eldude 15y ago
It doesn't look like anything to the banned individual apparently, as I just now discovered that my account was banned. Awesome. http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475

scott_s 15y ago

Can you point to the actual posts? Every time I've seen a hellbanned account, I have agreed with the decision. In the interest of full disclosure, my suspicion is that the way you expressed these opinions ran counter to the kind of discussion people want to see on HN. I may be wrong, of course, which is why I'd like to see the actual posts.

zerostar07 15y ago
Not that I care anymore, but why was this account banned anyway: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ignifero http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ignifero ?
eldude 15y ago
> Every time I've seen a hellbanned account, I have agreed with the decision. I'd be curious to get your opinion on my (just discovered) ban: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  ALL CAPS alls warrants a ban. That said, hellbans are fucking despicable. They might be the proper way to deal with spambots, but for contributing members they are as far as I am concerned incredibly unethical.
  - mixmastamyk 15y ago
    I agree. I used reddit daily for several years until a weirdo passive-agressive moderator? replied to one of my comments with profanity and then sabotaged my account in some way. Wasted a lot of time and haven't been back there for years, a shame. At least I learn more here, and there are fewer pictures of kittens.
interlagos 15y ago
Well here you go -- this account is now hellbanned.

mithaler 15y ago

There was one discussion that I participated where I predicted that Apple would see declining profit margins due to increased competition. Remarkably this completely benign, seemingly obvious observation saw me declared a troll, and shortly thereafter yet another account was hellbanned from HN. I'm curious--can you paste the text of that comment here if you still have it? It's possible that, for example, it was your tone that got you downvoted, not your message. Or it could have been the community perceiving you to be ignoring evidence, or any number of other things. In any case, this claim here isn't sufficient for us to judge the fairness of the response.

gbog 15y ago
There has been some threads where any comment that was not a praise of Steve Jobs and Apple was downvoted. Sometimes I feel fragmentation on HN, was is upvoted in a thread is downvoted in another.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  I have watched posts of my own go upvoted then downvoted then up voted then down voted more or less randomly. FWIW I do NOT think people should downvote based on disagreement. I think downvotes should be sparsely used and I personally upvote even people I disagree with.
  - gbog 15y ago
    Well, maybe, but now I am using thread upvote mostly to promote themes I like to see on HN, and comment downvotes to push down thanks, me-too, or otherwise empty answers.

teej 15y ago

In the last 6 months I've been running an experiment. An experiment to make Hacker News better. Because I felt Hacker News was going to shit in several ways and I felt like I could help. I couldn't stop naive newbies from making dumb comments, but I could stop fanboyism and groupthink. I decided that I was going to take a different approach to commenting. In essence, I wanted to be like DHH - highly opinionated, strongly worded, and unafraid to call people out. To ensure comment integrity, I stuck only to topics in which I strongly felt I was in the right. patio11, joshu, tptacek and pg were some of the people I spoke out against. I made the argument that those people were flat-out wrong. But not just that, I clarified -why- they were wrong in a reasoned way. And that was the key - explaining why. It turns out that people DID care about the truth. People WERE willing to hear out an alternate view and they voted with their upvotes. I was able to move my karma from 3.5k to 5k and move my average from 7 to 14 per comment. Many of my comments took a very contrarian view to the HN status quo. Many of them were directly targeted at the "HN elite". All of them took their share of downvotes from those who thought my comments didn't add value. But in the end, they were the most successful comments I've ever made. So don't lose hope! There is a way out of groupthink. But it takes hard work, great communication, and an academic view of persuasion. In the end, I think reasoned and rational discussion is what makes HN great, let's get back to that.

tshtf 15y ago
In the last 6 months I conducted a different experiment. I turned on "showdead" and looked through the posting history of users with dead posts. About a quarter of the time, I would have disagreed with the hellbanning. If you're going to ban a user, you might as well be honest and tell them up front.
- nirvana 15y ago
  I have showdead turned on as well. It breaks my heart to see these comments from people who are trying to contribute. I don't go look up all their past history, but I'd say %75 of the comments are attempts to contribute to the conversation (even if they aren't great attempts or original) and about %25 are just comments that don't really add anything, but aren't really offensive or spammy or inappropriate.

stfu 15y ago

Steven Colbert might be the best example of how good trolling can lead to very enlightening statements. In an ideal case it could even bring a self-discovery in the form of a Socratian dialogue that illustrates certain "taking things too serious" positions. Additionally I think one should draw a line between trolling and flaming. Just some "you suck" comments are not making a troll a troll.

jcampbell1 15y ago

The fact that you consider the observation obvious, is a sign that you were possibly trolling. You were probably being intellectually too lazy to make your point without resorting using tactics like calling your own opinions seemingly obvious. It is not obvious that increased competition leads to declining margins. Often increased competition validates the market, and increases consumer demand far more than the effect on pricing. I have seen it in my own industry, where our sales increase when a competitor launches a big ad campaign.

dasil003 15y ago

> Troll is, more often than not, a term used to circle the wagons. I think this is true by definition, after all, if the majority are trolling then it's culturally acceptable and you have 4chan. But I think if you are being intellectually honest you need to be open to the possibility that maybe you were acting like a dick on occasion. I've dealt with heavy duty trolling before, and it's a common refrain that the admins are "fascist" and that they are simply "censoring" unpopular opinions. All the while saying things that would get their asses kicked if said in public. For the unskilled troll their behavior is obvious, but the skilled troll can make himself indistinguishable from someone who just has a mild form of digital Aspergers. Often the only goal is to piss you off and waste your time. So in the battle against trolls, detached and ruthless action is often necessary because anything else allows them to win. If there is some collateral damage because one's opinion is just too "different", probably the best thing is to move on to a different forum, or just start a blog. Then you can post your opinions and gain even more notoriety with "the regulars" possibly defending you with the backing of their mighty reputation. Witness Ted Dziuba, that cocky prick would for sure be hellbanned if he waded into HN, but he doesn't have to because everyone reads his posts directly.

tokenadult 15y ago

I'll disagree with you in part while agreeing in part. I invite onlookers to apply the rubric from pg's essay "How to Disagree" http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html to rate how well I do in disagreeing here. You write, Here on HN, however, as with most communities where you start to recognize the regulars (tptacek, raganwald, etc), "trolling" is redefined to simply mean "going against the grain." I disagree with this, because I have openly disagreed at least with tptacek, and certainly with other users who have higher karma totals than I have and have been on Hacker News longer than I have, and yet I have never been hellbanned. I have seen even more open, pointed, and frequent disagreements with some of the "regulars" here from some of the other regulars, but those accounts are still alive and well. I have used the same username here, and only this one username here, during all the 1122 days since I formed my user account. To the best of my knowledge and belief, each of my posts has been visible to users since it was posted, and the majority of my comments have stayed above 0 net karma ever since they were posted. I agree with you that expressions of opinion that disagree with the joint opinion of the most active HN participants can result in individual net downvotes of comments. Before I got here, it was declared that the site founder is okay with participants downvoting to express disagreement with comments, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 and when I lose karma on a net basis with a particular comment, I look at how the comment was written, and think about how I could make a comment that disagrees with prevailing opinion be more persuasive the next time. (Another user who has replied to you reports experiments in doing this, and I will look at the examples found in the past comments by that user to see how it is done.) Once in a while, if an issue is important enough to me, I'll openly (and, I hope, respectfully and thoughtfully) disagree, and figure that such occasions when I burn through karma is what karma is worth accumulating for. To sum up, I agree with the proposition that some comments here are downvoted solely to express disagreement. The art of writing comments is to figure out how to express disagreement and still appeal to disagreeing readers as a thoughtful participant in intellectual discussion. On the other hand, I don't think most users here flag comments for disagreement, but rather for blatant violation of the site guidelines. I disagree with the proposition that anyone has been hellbanned solely for posting comments that are in factual disagreement with majority opinion here. I see plenty of live accounts that manage to openly express disagreement frequently, and I possess one. AFTER EDIT: I note, entirely with amusement, that this comment is bouncing up and down in karma score just now. Whatever, I'm just trying to point to some reasons to think about the issue differently from the opinion expressed in the parent comment. Whether you the reader agree or not is up to you. AFTER FURTHER EDIT, RELATING TO COMMENT REPLYING TO THIS COMMENT: Thank you for your reply. I agree that it is logically correct to say that pointing to accounts that survive despite disagreement is not an airtight proof that no accounts have been hellbanned for disagreement. On the other hand, my general point is that I don't see any affirmative evidence for the extraordinary claim that this site is moderated with swift and frequent hellbanning for disagreement as a routine part of the moderation policy. I join the other users who have already said, "link, please?" to follow up statements of the nature of "In each case nothing I'd ever said would be considered trolling by any rational observer," so that we can all see just what the problem was. I had showdead on for most of 2010 and 2011, and I never felt, as I read dead posts, that users who don't see dead posts are missing much from the thousands of posts here on Hacker News. The way to get a reality check on this statement, of course, is to turn on showdead and see what dead posts look like day after day after day on a variety of subjects in a variety of threads.

eldude 15y ago

I'm absolutely shocked and disgusted to be be reading this discussion regarding being "hellbanned" only to discover that my account in fact has been hellbanned for the past 1.5 yrs without even knowing it! http://news.ycombinator.org/threads?id=CrabDude http://news.ycombinator.org/threads?id=CrabDude * enable showdead in your profile to read my comments As you can see from my comments and contributions, most are extremely well reasoned and often entirely unique and invaluable contributions to a given conversation that to my frustration were inexplicably never upvoted or commented on, without any real insight as to why. I honestly am in shock and beyond frustrated that so much of my efforts and attempts to edify and contribute have been undermined by something that is explicitly allowed in comment guidelines. [1] Specifically, the comment that is apparently responsible for my hellban, was on a post that linked to MY NodeKnockout entry which both won the competition category and received over 60 votes to end up on the front page: HEY ALL! REMEMBER TO VOTE FOR US! WE'RE TRYING TO WIN THE INNOVATION CATEGORY! http://nodeknockout.com/teams/starcraft-2-destroyed-my-marri... AND RETWEET THIS WITH #nodeko! =) Worse, this manner of comment is explicitly mentioned as okay in the guidelines. [1] Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." And to any who would comment that my use of all caps elicited my ban, I'd respond by pointing out the use of capitalization is used "for emphasis," [2] in this case, specifically, enthusiasm -- unfortunately making the resulting ban all the more disgusting and frustrating. To any in YC who have control over such things, please unban my account. I would greatly prefer to use it and retain all my contributions than be forced to play wack-a-mole in response to inaccurate rule enforcement. [1] http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps

ericd 15y ago
That comment looks a LOT like spam. Hellbanning is necessary, because if a spammer realizes they've been banned overtly, they'll just create a new account and keep on spamming. You do have a lot of legitimately good comments in that list, though.
- eldude 15y ago
  While I may even agree with you, the unfortunate fact is that it is not in fact spam and violates no rules or guidelines and suffers only from being overly enthusiastic in a positive and friendly manner. In truth, it is not even "empty" in that it provides an important link to the voting page. At best this is an example of incompetence in the form of a poorly written spam detection algorithm, at worst it represents an admin's lazy disregard for the effects of "hellbanning" on a sincere community.

philwelch 15y ago

It would be helpful if you provided links to your previous accounts, so we could see for ourselves.

anigbrowl 15y ago

I find that kind of hard to believe. I don't hack or even work in the computer industry any more, have got into arguments with almost every long-term member at some point or other, and hold distinctly minority positions on a variety of topics (most often about governance). And heaven knows that I can be as snarky or pompous as anyone else when I've had a bad day. Maybe I'm just lucky, but the admins seem pretty hands off to me.

jcr 15y ago
anigbrowl, I enjoy your comments, both on your good days and your bad days. On rare occasions it seems like you may have misread something since your reply comes from a surprising angle, but English is not the first language of everyone, and everyone misreads things on occasion. The good news is when I see something surprising as if things were misread, it means I should reread them to make sure that I didn't misread them.
- anigbrowl 15y ago
  Why thank you.

shiven 15y ago

The hellbanning is what turned me off commenting and sharing my opinions on HN. With the passage of time, what was once a forum to discuss (and openly dissent) ideas feels like an old boys club ... with a few anointed head goons to keep the order (and teach newcomers a lesson with zealous downvoting and hellbanning), a few ol timers who still act decently in hopes that HN may yet regain its spirit (as they remember it) and the rest of the crowd filled with the usual riff-raff on any web forum who have no idea what HN started off as and will probably never care. PG, HN was (is?) a great idea and a great place and well worth the while. Burned two handles over the years, getting the hang of it, but by then it was no longer the place I liked. I'll keep lurking, at least for now. Good luck.

tripzilch 15y ago

I agree that hellbanning on HN is completely out of control. I've seen people (that otherwise posted useful contributions, before and after) hellbanned for making a rather tasteless joke. The joke was sufficiently tasteless that I can totally see a moderator suspending or even banning that user. But not hellbanning. Not that it's strictly worse or anything, it's just so utterly useless and childish. This user had no idea that anything had happened, and he just kept posting for weeks. All that wasted time! And I'm fairly sure that if a moderator would have just told him "hey we'd rather not have people make jokes about dead children here" the guy would have replied "right, my bad that was out of line, won't happen again" cause the rest of his comments didn't seem very inflammatory or anything. Instead the guy gets no message at all and keeps on posting invisibly. A regular ban would have at least sent some message. ... and then there's these things I've heard about people getting temporary hellbans? So people can come back all butthurt after realizing they've been tricked into invisibly wasting their time? That's the dumbest kind of moderation I've ever heard about, really. A hellban should be forever, or not at all. There is no such thing as a "hell suspension".

interlagos 15y ago

EDIT - Posted the above, and now, yet again, I'm experience 10 second or so page generation delays, which is another of the (the rather pathetic slowban) passive-aggressive ways that HN tries to force conformity. Perhaps it's just coincidental, but a test on another IP had virtually instant response times. EDIT2 - Awesome. Hellbanned as well. For those who see showdead, you now know how HN manages such a coherent, consistent (yet superficial, often wrong, self-congratulatory) opinion.