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I had this happen to me when I critiqued a YC backed company. Had a few thousand in 'meaningless internet karma points'. You pretty soon realise after a few fur

I had this happen to me when I critiqued a YC backed company. Had a few thousand in 'meaningless internet karma points'. You pretty soon realise after a few further comments anyway, so I doubt it's actually effective. It's pretty mean spirited though - generally a "douchebag" move. It'd be like having a bad employee, but instead of firing him, or discussing his work, just don't bother paying him any more. After being hellbanned I actually realised that commenting on internet forums is toxic, generally a waste of time, and not productive. So I quit. At the start, you sort of care about "karma". But you end up realising it's a measure of two things. 1. How much time you waste commenting on the internet, and 2. How much you can agree with the groupthink echo-chamber. But for those that like spending time commenting, I would have thought following a subreddit model would work better here, with the growth. Spread the power out. If I get hellbanned from the "rust is the future!!!" subhackernews, big whoop. It'd also help with filtering out all the non-interesting (self driving cars) stories. But then perhaps it'd basically be reddit at that stage which would defeat the point...

dang 12y ago
Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. So they make new accounts and post linkless statements designed to be unanswerable. We don't ban people because they "critiqued a YC backed company". Edit: Some of the replies have made good points, and I realize that I overreacted. Sorry about that. Please shoot us an email at hn@ycombinator.com if you feel your account was banned unfairly. We're always happy to look into this—there's no question that we make mistakes; the most I can claim is that we're eager to, and do, correct them when they're brought to our attention.
- eksith 12y ago
  What are your thoughts on this episode? https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker_news/ https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...
  - dang 12y ago
    That was before I started working on HN, so I don't have any inside details. But I'll give you my take on what I think happened, based on the time I did spend working with pg on the site. I need a few minutes though--there's another comment pending on my stack. Will come back and edit this. (Edit: I haven't forgotten, but have to run out to an appointment, so this will need to wait for another hour or two. Sorry about that.) Edit: back now. My gut feeling is that PG might not have had enough time to look into all the details. I say that because June 2012 was about the peak of when HN moderation was extremely time-constrained (I started a few months later) and the only option was to enforce the guidelines generically.
    - eksith 12y ago
      It's cool. I'm just curious about your take since, by necessity, you get to see far more comments than I do and get to see patterns that I may miss completely. For the record, I don't think he deserved a hellbanning, but then again, this was a while ago. And the wild west hadn't probably settled yet.
  - opendais 12y ago
    > The guidelines (as you probably already knew) also say that if you have a question about moderation, send us an email instead of posting about it on the site. So it sounds like got banned for refusing to follow the guidelines?
    - jrochkind1 12y ago
      I don't see that in the guidelines, nor do I see an email address to contact anyone in the guidelines (or anywhere else). https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - DanBC 12y ago
        On that very page: Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com.
- throwit99 12y ago
  Maybe you don't personally, maybe you don't as a group anymore. As I suggested in my original post though, I have more useful things to do than look back at comments I posted years ago and compile evidence. I've moved on. I'm sure it happens a lot more often than you realise, because in general when people get hellbanned, they come to the same realisations as me.
  - dang 12y ago
    > anymore Not only did we never ban people for criticizing YC companies, the very first thing PG told me when I started moderating HN, and the thing that he emphasized most strongly after that, was never to do things that could be construed (or misconstrued) as censorship of anti-YC stories. (I've edited out some irritation that leaked through in my original version of this comment.)
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - selmnoo 12y ago
      dang, I think HN has improved for the better, especially since some effort has been made to make things more transparent. But it would be despicably dishonest for you guys to deny that routinely you guys do things here to protect YC companies (including manipulating voting points on comments/ submissions). One example (on the top of my mind) is the drchrono post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7178004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7178004 Even though Skeletor made that comment like ... 20 days after the HN submission, it somehow found its way to the top. Obviously, this was through manual action. Obviously, a non-YC company is not afforded such a privilege. Idling in #startups of freenode (unofficial HN channel), I've heard too many of these stories. The stories of rankban upon some critical comment on a YC-funded company, a slowban because of a critical comment on some YC personality, etc. etc. There are countless examples. When these things happen one after the other, you lose trust, we cannot believe you anymore. Please stop doing this. I think the only way to win trust back at this point is if you again expose voting points at all times.
- existencebox 12y ago
  For what its worth, validity of the hellbanning aside, I do agree with the points he brought up re: emergent problems in scored boards. The karma system does tend to contribute heavily to the echo-chambery nature of many of these discussion forums; and while I certainly think HN is in a much better state than any others that come to mind, it's not immune. (Mentioning because to me, this point is far closer to home than the actual reason for the ban, yet often seems to go without effective discussion of possible remediation.)
  - PavlovsCat 12y ago
    Maybe sorting options would help? I'd prefer to sort responses by time (and maybe some javascript to mark new comments since last visit on the page, but I dream..), or even sorted randomly because why not. Maybe serve that from a static cache that only gets refreshed every 5 minutes or so? I would still use it, gladly.
    - krapp 12y ago
      I think account-level filters might alleviate a number of problems users tend to complain about here. Just imagine how useful people might find it to simply block posts by keyword, or not show threads with a certain ratio of upvotes to downvotes, or be able to train their own Bayesian filter. They wouldn't even have to change the UI (which they seem to not want to do) apart from what a particular user sees.
      - existencebox 12y ago
        The filters would get very complex very fast though, I imagine. The symptoms of "echo-chamber-itis" are as varied as the humans that exibit them. Sometimes it's aggressive downvoting of an idea that doesn't align with the status quo despite validity for discussion, sometimes it's aggressive upvoting of an idea that aligns better, sometimes it's an aggressive amount of churn as various subgroups battle for "placing" the item, which results in the item being read as a net 0. (I'm being very hand wavy and referring to patterns I see broader than just HN; before anyone starts jumping up and down about how the HN algorithms avoid any specific problem I mention :P )
- glimcat 12y ago
  * Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. * When that kind of response comes from the site's moderator, I really don't see the level of toxicity improving any time soon. It's likely statistically factual, but in context it's just another of the "mean, stupid things" that Paul Graham called you out as being here to address. And you appear to have done nothing to investigate whether the previous user's post was factually correct before slinging personal accusations. If this gets me hellbanned too, so be it. Conversation and community on this site is a toxic mess that leaves people afraid to post anything. The main good thing is following users like patio11 and tptacek. http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hack...
  - dang 12y ago
    You may be right. I'll look at the comment later and see if I should have written it differently. There's no time to reflect just now. I try hard not to let personal irritation leak through in my HN comments, but I do fail at it. The most I can claim is a willingness to correct mistakes.
    - gohjo 12y ago
      It's wildly inappropriate to lob a blanket accusation of fraud against every single person who has ever complained about your moderation. People have wildly divergent views as to what's appropriate, what's a little rude, and what's over the line. This means that even if you really truly believe that there was NEVER a mistake made during moderation, that some people will truly believe what they said. Good moderation requires a ton of empathy and kindness.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - dllthomas 12y ago
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  I haven't been banned here. Yet. But in the places I have been banned, it's not been my fault. The people who say "we don't ban people because of X" are, like most people, just telling themselves a pleasant lie. There's that one guy, who while never doing anything outrageously obnoxious, rubs you the wrong way. And eventually you're going to find something borderline or even milder than that, and use your petty powers. This is human nature, I'd almost certainly do the same. Everyone would.
- krapp 12y ago
  You don't tell people why they've been banned at all, or even when they've been banned. Is it any wonder that conspiracy theories would arise around such a purposely opaque practice?
  - mpyne 12y ago
    My experience comes from a different (IRL) context, but the type of people you need to moderate or ban are also often the type of people who will move right up to the edge of any bright line you draw, and use it is a shield for further antisocial behavior. Sometimes ambiguity is its own reward, especially when the lines are well-understood by most already. As just one example I'm the resident "soldier" for the government (as one HN user was so nice to call me), I often post comments that are in opposition to many of the tenets that are popular on HN, and yet I've not been banned, my karma is not negative, and those I debate with generally treat me and my arguments with respect. If it were just up to ideology I should have been hellbanned by now, and yet here I am.
- modifier 12y ago
  Dang, you're what I call an emo-moderator. You're emotional when you moderate and it shows. Go ahead and hellban me. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
- gohjo 12y ago
  No, here's what you do: 1) you ban people who are rude and who you disagree with philosophically, while you do NOT ban the equally rude people who you agree with. For evidence of the above, look at users like etherael (and his other names; not sure if he tors/vpns or if you can find them), who are raging assholes on a semi-routine basis, but who aren't banned because Libertarian BitCoin Lover matches your values. And let's face facts, you're less willing to ban people who agree with you, even if they're toxic assholes. If you banned people who you agreed with for the same exact crimes as those you disagree with HN would be a better place. As it stands, people who agree with you are allowed to be ruder and more toxic than people who disagree with you. This is used as a game by some of HN's worst users who brag on IRC about how it's fun to try to engage in flamewars where they don't get banned but the other individual does. edit: Not to mention other game that's played by a lot of folks, which is to be as big of a dick as is possible without actually using openly aggressive language. The goal there being to generate an emotional reaction while retaining some semblance of plausible deniability, because everybody knows that you won't ban them for "polite" taunting, even if it's toxic shit that can't go anywhere useful or interesting.
  - dang 12y ago
    The people who hold the opposite ideology believe fervently that HN is biased the other way (liberal, politically correct, socialist, etc., are some of the terms they use). I realize it's a bit facile to say "both sides claim bias therefore we must be doing something right". But for what it's worth, no, we don't consider ideology when banning people, we consider incivility.
    - gohjo 12y ago
      Which is why many toxic people have perfected the art of being an enormous asshole while being "civil". Because they know that you allow that to happen. As to your claim that you aren't soft on Libertarians... LOL. I've actually A/B tested this, saying the same toxic shit but with the positions swapped. Upvoted in one case, banned in the other. Part of the mechanic might be that you never even see the Libertarian version because it doesn't get flagged in the first place, despite being identical in profanity, intelligence, and toxicity to the version that does get flagged. but whatever the causes, there's a real and definite bias as to what positions are tolerated here. --- Response to below: Etherael gives good conversation like: "Congratulations, you are a retard." "I have no hopes for you at all." "Get off that lawn, you old crank." "Why is this being downvoted? Are people really so naive as to not be aware of this?" --- " Because when you present a point in this way with this kind of language and in this kind of behavior, you just lose everything." You're right. I have the same amount of respect for dang as he has for the public at large. And that's my fault. I should be better, even if I really believe that HN is worse and less useful each year, and that dang is poorly suited to moderation. He's probably a smart guy, but we're all just apes, and he's one who isn't the right fit for the job.
- rudolf0 12y ago
  >Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? >their claims are nearly always false. >perennial sob story Hmm, I wonder where these fall on Graham's disagreement pyramid... Seriously, how hard is it to tell the guy "shoot me an email and I'll look into the ban" and then make your judgment after that? Maybe the guy's bullshitting us. Or maybe he really was banned unjustly. How can you possibly know?
  - dang 12y ago
    > Seriously, how hard is it to tell the guy "shoot me an email and I'll look into the ban" and then make your judgment after that? You're absolutely right. I'll add that to my comment.
- amyhoy 12y ago
  Hi there. Why not tell me why I was hellbanned then? Here's my comment history. Such bullying, so horrible, wow: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ahoyhere https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ahoyhere The only conclusion is that HN hellbans dissent. I'm about as far from a troll as you can get. It's your platform; do what you want. But don't lie about it.
  - lotharbot 12y ago
    It appears the last activity you posted was in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6472749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6472749 You called Alex (whose friend had died and he didn't find out for two years) a "shitty friend" and said he didn't "think of, or care for, others". I don't know if that's worthy of a hellban. But I do know I wouldn't consider the offending comments mere "dissent".
    - amyhoy 12y ago
      Neither of your things in "quotes" are things that I said. The "shitty friend" was alexcap's own words. The phrase "think of, or care for, others" didn't show up in my comment at all. I didn't call him a shitty friend. He wrote, "Now you’re probably thinking I’m a real shitty friend" after his explanation of the events — which I quoted, in quotes, very clearly a direct quote from his own words — and I wrote "Yes" to answer the question. 95% of my comment was advice for people on what to do in the situation that the friend is reaching out to them as that friend did, who got ignored and later died and that person didn't know for years. If you write an essay about something you did that you think was bad, and post it to Medium, and post it to HN, and then say "You probably think I did something bad," is it reaaaally so controversial to comment with "Yes, I agree, I think you did something bad"? Also, if you thought that was my last comment, maybe you don't see my actual last exchange? It was about my bootstrapping conference and upcoming web site. Perhaps it's truly hell banned as in not visible? It was this: http://skitch-replacement.s3.amazonaws.com/ahoyhere_s_comments_%7C_Hacker_News-20141110-182947.gif http://skitch-replacement.s3.amazonaws.com/ahoyhere_s_commen...
      - 12y ago
- madrobby 12y ago
  Ohai, I've been hell-banned and don't know why. I guess as someone successfully running a software business _and_ being a well-known open source person I have to place in a forum for people who want to run successful internet businesses and are into tech.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    What account was hell banned?
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  So on the topic of unfair bans and the new system, here is a useful way for you to both improve transparency and figure out for yourself if the new system is working. Post a list of comments which were [dead]ed under the new system but would not have been [dead]ed under the old system. If the list contains a bunch of comments like "u r a gay homoz", you'll make a pretty convincing case (both to yourself and everyone else) that the new system is awesome. If the list contains a bunch of "I'm concerned about the security implications of ordinary users putting significant money into bitcoin..." then maybe the new system isn't so awesome. [edit: I realize it's probably too late for this to be seen, perils of posting from IST.]
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    It's being seen. (Perils of getting up in the middle of the night. ;) )
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
It's little different than pre-internet communities. I mean, we paint this adorable picture of small-town life from some previous golden era, in movies and in books, and even in the stories of your great-grandparents. But people are assholes. And they found a few people they didn't like (for good reasons, for bad reasons, for none at all) and did the meatspace equivalent of hellbanishment. Yeh, here, you're just wasting time on the internet, maybe you can stop caring about it. But people do this the world over, and there's no escaping it. This is what people do. They're mean fucks, and if you don't fit in, you're just left out in the cold.
bootload 12y ago
"... After being hellbanned I actually realised that commenting on internet forums is toxic, generally a waste of time, and not productive. So I quit. ..." Yes. ... But for those that like spending time commenting, I would have thought following a subreddit model would work better here, with the growth. Spread the power out. ..." Agreed.
danielweber 12y ago
IF someone is a genuine troll, then hell-banning is a great way of dealing with it, because it maximizes the time wasted by the troll and minimizes the time used by the moderator. However, if the person isn't actually out-and-out to mess with your site, it sucks. I've seen lots of communities go down the tubes because the moderators get busy with life, and then Something Happens On The Forum, and moderators passive-aggressively go "fine, we're just gonna act like this, and if you don't want us to do that, then you should make the community act better!" Basically announcing that they are going to put in minimal effort to moderation, and the community definitely notices. Professional moderation, like HN uses, seems like the best way to go.
- morganvachon 12y ago
  Indeed, it's a situation where the needs of the many (HN community as a whole) outweigh the needs of the few (banned non-troll commentators). The danger lies in becoming such an elite, closed group due to blind moderation and banning even the most innocent members over a perceived slight, that the moderators themselves end up the trolls of what is left of the community. For example, there's a certain GNU/Linux distro that is maintained by a core group of devs who have become overtly hostile to any new users of their project, and actively seek to discourage "newbies" from seeking help and getting any benefit out of the project. One would think the toxic atmosphere would have killed the distro off long ago, yet it's maintaining popularity and even seeing an uptick in a certain niche community. I certainly don't understand how it thrives with such a rotten core; yes, it's overall a very well done distro, but even the best product normally can't survive that kind of cancer. That's not to say that HN would ever end up like that; indeed, from what I've seen they are doing an excellent job overall with maintaining and moderating this community. I just hope it continues to stay that way or improve, instead of going down a dark path towards chaos.
segmondy 12y ago
My account segmond got hell banned, it's a miracle that this is not. HN will downvote any comment that they don't like down to hell. An opinion that is disagreeable with is flagged, it's like the opposite of facebook like button. Dislike. You don't have to spam or be disruptive. I'm putting my account name on here so folks can look at it. I was new to HN, didn't know much, had no idea I was dead. :) This account get's a decent amount of flag too when I make unpopular opinion, I have to stop myself from censoring myself because the moment I feel like I can't talk or participate, I will just leave the community. If I can't express myself around a bunch of "hackers" then what's the point?

dang 12y ago

Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. So they make new accounts and post linkless statements designed to be unanswerable. We don't ban people because they "critiqued a YC backed company". Edit: Some of the replies have made good points, and I realize that I overreacted. Sorry about that. Please shoot us an email at hn@ycombinator.com if you feel your account was banned unfairly. We're always happy to look into this—there's no question that we make mistakes; the most I can claim is that we're eager to, and do, correct them when they're brought to our attention.

eksith 12y ago
What are your thoughts on this episode? https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker_news/ https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...
- dang 12y ago
  That was before I started working on HN, so I don't have any inside details. But I'll give you my take on what I think happened, based on the time I did spend working with pg on the site. I need a few minutes though--there's another comment pending on my stack. Will come back and edit this. (Edit: I haven't forgotten, but have to run out to an appointment, so this will need to wait for another hour or two. Sorry about that.) Edit: back now. My gut feeling is that PG might not have had enough time to look into all the details. I say that because June 2012 was about the peak of when HN moderation was extremely time-constrained (I started a few months later) and the only option was to enforce the guidelines generically.
  - eksith 12y ago
    It's cool. I'm just curious about your take since, by necessity, you get to see far more comments than I do and get to see patterns that I may miss completely. For the record, I don't think he deserved a hellbanning, but then again, this was a while ago. And the wild west hadn't probably settled yet.
- opendais 12y ago
  > The guidelines (as you probably already knew) also say that if you have a question about moderation, send us an email instead of posting about it on the site. So it sounds like got banned for refusing to follow the guidelines?
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    I don't see that in the guidelines, nor do I see an email address to contact anyone in the guidelines (or anywhere else). https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - DanBC 12y ago
      On that very page: Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com.
throwit99 12y ago
Maybe you don't personally, maybe you don't as a group anymore. As I suggested in my original post though, I have more useful things to do than look back at comments I posted years ago and compile evidence. I've moved on. I'm sure it happens a lot more often than you realise, because in general when people get hellbanned, they come to the same realisations as me.
- dang 12y ago
  > anymore Not only did we never ban people for criticizing YC companies, the very first thing PG told me when I started moderating HN, and the thing that he emphasized most strongly after that, was never to do things that could be construed (or misconstrued) as censorship of anti-YC stories. (I've edited out some irritation that leaked through in my original version of this comment.)
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - selmnoo 12y ago
    dang, I think HN has improved for the better, especially since some effort has been made to make things more transparent. But it would be despicably dishonest for you guys to deny that routinely you guys do things here to protect YC companies (including manipulating voting points on comments/ submissions). One example (on the top of my mind) is the drchrono post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7178004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7178004 Even though Skeletor made that comment like ... 20 days after the HN submission, it somehow found its way to the top. Obviously, this was through manual action. Obviously, a non-YC company is not afforded such a privilege. Idling in #startups of freenode (unofficial HN channel), I've heard too many of these stories. The stories of rankban upon some critical comment on a YC-funded company, a slowban because of a critical comment on some YC personality, etc. etc. There are countless examples. When these things happen one after the other, you lose trust, we cannot believe you anymore. Please stop doing this. I think the only way to win trust back at this point is if you again expose voting points at all times.
existencebox 12y ago
For what its worth, validity of the hellbanning aside, I do agree with the points he brought up re: emergent problems in scored boards. The karma system does tend to contribute heavily to the echo-chambery nature of many of these discussion forums; and while I certainly think HN is in a much better state than any others that come to mind, it's not immune. (Mentioning because to me, this point is far closer to home than the actual reason for the ban, yet often seems to go without effective discussion of possible remediation.)
- PavlovsCat 12y ago
  Maybe sorting options would help? I'd prefer to sort responses by time (and maybe some javascript to mark new comments since last visit on the page, but I dream..), or even sorted randomly because why not. Maybe serve that from a static cache that only gets refreshed every 5 minutes or so? I would still use it, gladly.
  - krapp 12y ago
    I think account-level filters might alleviate a number of problems users tend to complain about here. Just imagine how useful people might find it to simply block posts by keyword, or not show threads with a certain ratio of upvotes to downvotes, or be able to train their own Bayesian filter. They wouldn't even have to change the UI (which they seem to not want to do) apart from what a particular user sees.
    - existencebox 12y ago
      The filters would get very complex very fast though, I imagine. The symptoms of "echo-chamber-itis" are as varied as the humans that exibit them. Sometimes it's aggressive downvoting of an idea that doesn't align with the status quo despite validity for discussion, sometimes it's aggressive upvoting of an idea that aligns better, sometimes it's an aggressive amount of churn as various subgroups battle for "placing" the item, which results in the item being read as a net 0. (I'm being very hand wavy and referring to patterns I see broader than just HN; before anyone starts jumping up and down about how the HN algorithms avoid any specific problem I mention :P )
glimcat 12y ago
* Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. * When that kind of response comes from the site's moderator, I really don't see the level of toxicity improving any time soon. It's likely statistically factual, but in context it's just another of the "mean, stupid things" that Paul Graham called you out as being here to address. And you appear to have done nothing to investigate whether the previous user's post was factually correct before slinging personal accusations. If this gets me hellbanned too, so be it. Conversation and community on this site is a toxic mess that leaves people afraid to post anything. The main good thing is following users like patio11 and tptacek. http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hack...
- dang 12y ago
  You may be right. I'll look at the comment later and see if I should have written it differently. There's no time to reflect just now. I try hard not to let personal irritation leak through in my HN comments, but I do fail at it. The most I can claim is a willingness to correct mistakes.
  - gohjo 12y ago
    It's wildly inappropriate to lob a blanket accusation of fraud against every single person who has ever complained about your moderation. People have wildly divergent views as to what's appropriate, what's a little rude, and what's over the line. This means that even if you really truly believe that there was NEVER a mistake made during moderation, that some people will truly believe what they said. Good moderation requires a ton of empathy and kindness.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - dllthomas 12y ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
I haven't been banned here. Yet. But in the places I have been banned, it's not been my fault. The people who say "we don't ban people because of X" are, like most people, just telling themselves a pleasant lie. There's that one guy, who while never doing anything outrageously obnoxious, rubs you the wrong way. And eventually you're going to find something borderline or even milder than that, and use your petty powers. This is human nature, I'd almost certainly do the same. Everyone would.
krapp 12y ago
You don't tell people why they've been banned at all, or even when they've been banned. Is it any wonder that conspiracy theories would arise around such a purposely opaque practice?
- mpyne 12y ago
  My experience comes from a different (IRL) context, but the type of people you need to moderate or ban are also often the type of people who will move right up to the edge of any bright line you draw, and use it is a shield for further antisocial behavior. Sometimes ambiguity is its own reward, especially when the lines are well-understood by most already. As just one example I'm the resident "soldier" for the government (as one HN user was so nice to call me), I often post comments that are in opposition to many of the tenets that are popular on HN, and yet I've not been banned, my karma is not negative, and those I debate with generally treat me and my arguments with respect. If it were just up to ideology I should have been hellbanned by now, and yet here I am.
modifier 12y ago
Dang, you're what I call an emo-moderator. You're emotional when you moderate and it shows. Go ahead and hellban me. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
gohjo 12y ago
No, here's what you do: 1) you ban people who are rude and who you disagree with philosophically, while you do NOT ban the equally rude people who you agree with. For evidence of the above, look at users like etherael (and his other names; not sure if he tors/vpns or if you can find them), who are raging assholes on a semi-routine basis, but who aren't banned because Libertarian BitCoin Lover matches your values. And let's face facts, you're less willing to ban people who agree with you, even if they're toxic assholes. If you banned people who you agreed with for the same exact crimes as those you disagree with HN would be a better place. As it stands, people who agree with you are allowed to be ruder and more toxic than people who disagree with you. This is used as a game by some of HN's worst users who brag on IRC about how it's fun to try to engage in flamewars where they don't get banned but the other individual does. edit: Not to mention other game that's played by a lot of folks, which is to be as big of a dick as is possible without actually using openly aggressive language. The goal there being to generate an emotional reaction while retaining some semblance of plausible deniability, because everybody knows that you won't ban them for "polite" taunting, even if it's toxic shit that can't go anywhere useful or interesting.
- dang 12y ago
  The people who hold the opposite ideology believe fervently that HN is biased the other way (liberal, politically correct, socialist, etc., are some of the terms they use). I realize it's a bit facile to say "both sides claim bias therefore we must be doing something right". But for what it's worth, no, we don't consider ideology when banning people, we consider incivility.
  - gohjo 12y ago
    Which is why many toxic people have perfected the art of being an enormous asshole while being "civil". Because they know that you allow that to happen. As to your claim that you aren't soft on Libertarians... LOL. I've actually A/B tested this, saying the same toxic shit but with the positions swapped. Upvoted in one case, banned in the other. Part of the mechanic might be that you never even see the Libertarian version because it doesn't get flagged in the first place, despite being identical in profanity, intelligence, and toxicity to the version that does get flagged. but whatever the causes, there's a real and definite bias as to what positions are tolerated here. --- Response to below: Etherael gives good conversation like: "Congratulations, you are a retard." "I have no hopes for you at all." "Get off that lawn, you old crank." "Why is this being downvoted? Are people really so naive as to not be aware of this?" --- " Because when you present a point in this way with this kind of language and in this kind of behavior, you just lose everything." You're right. I have the same amount of respect for dang as he has for the public at large. And that's my fault. I should be better, even if I really believe that HN is worse and less useful each year, and that dang is poorly suited to moderation. He's probably a smart guy, but we're all just apes, and he's one who isn't the right fit for the job.
rudolf0 12y ago
>Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? >their claims are nearly always false. >perennial sob story Hmm, I wonder where these fall on Graham's disagreement pyramid... Seriously, how hard is it to tell the guy "shoot me an email and I'll look into the ban" and then make your judgment after that? Maybe the guy's bullshitting us. Or maybe he really was banned unjustly. How can you possibly know?
- dang 12y ago
  > Seriously, how hard is it to tell the guy "shoot me an email and I'll look into the ban" and then make your judgment after that? You're absolutely right. I'll add that to my comment.
amyhoy 12y ago
Hi there. Why not tell me why I was hellbanned then? Here's my comment history. Such bullying, so horrible, wow: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ahoyhere https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ahoyhere The only conclusion is that HN hellbans dissent. I'm about as far from a troll as you can get. It's your platform; do what you want. But don't lie about it.
- lotharbot 12y ago
  It appears the last activity you posted was in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6472749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6472749 You called Alex (whose friend had died and he didn't find out for two years) a "shitty friend" and said he didn't "think of, or care for, others". I don't know if that's worthy of a hellban. But I do know I wouldn't consider the offending comments mere "dissent".
  - amyhoy 12y ago
    Neither of your things in "quotes" are things that I said. The "shitty friend" was alexcap's own words. The phrase "think of, or care for, others" didn't show up in my comment at all. I didn't call him a shitty friend. He wrote, "Now you’re probably thinking I’m a real shitty friend" after his explanation of the events — which I quoted, in quotes, very clearly a direct quote from his own words — and I wrote "Yes" to answer the question. 95% of my comment was advice for people on what to do in the situation that the friend is reaching out to them as that friend did, who got ignored and later died and that person didn't know for years. If you write an essay about something you did that you think was bad, and post it to Medium, and post it to HN, and then say "You probably think I did something bad," is it reaaaally so controversial to comment with "Yes, I agree, I think you did something bad"? Also, if you thought that was my last comment, maybe you don't see my actual last exchange? It was about my bootstrapping conference and upcoming web site. Perhaps it's truly hell banned as in not visible? It was this: http://skitch-replacement.s3.amazonaws.com/ahoyhere_s_comments_%7C_Hacker_News-20141110-182947.gif http://skitch-replacement.s3.amazonaws.com/ahoyhere_s_commen...
    - 12y ago
madrobby 12y ago
Ohai, I've been hell-banned and don't know why. I guess as someone successfully running a software business _and_ being a well-known open source person I have to place in a forum for people who want to run successful internet businesses and are into tech.
- DanBC 12y ago
  What account was hell banned?
yummyfajitas 12y ago
So on the topic of unfair bans and the new system, here is a useful way for you to both improve transparency and figure out for yourself if the new system is working. Post a list of comments which were [dead]ed under the new system but would not have been [dead]ed under the old system. If the list contains a bunch of comments like "u r a gay homoz", you'll make a pretty convincing case (both to yourself and everyone else) that the new system is awesome. If the list contains a bunch of "I'm concerned about the security implications of ordinary users putting significant money into bitcoin..." then maybe the new system isn't so awesome. [edit: I realize it's probably too late for this to be seen, perils of posting from IST.]
- jacquesm 12y ago
  It's being seen. (Perils of getting up in the middle of the night. ;) )

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

It's little different than pre-internet communities. I mean, we paint this adorable picture of small-town life from some previous golden era, in movies and in books, and even in the stories of your great-grandparents. But people are assholes. And they found a few people they didn't like (for good reasons, for bad reasons, for none at all) and did the meatspace equivalent of hellbanishment. Yeh, here, you're just wasting time on the internet, maybe you can stop caring about it. But people do this the world over, and there's no escaping it. This is what people do. They're mean fucks, and if you don't fit in, you're just left out in the cold.

bootload 12y ago

"... After being hellbanned I actually realised that commenting on internet forums is toxic, generally a waste of time, and not productive. So I quit. ..." Yes. ... But for those that like spending time commenting, I would have thought following a subreddit model would work better here, with the growth. Spread the power out. ..." Agreed.

danielweber 12y ago

IF someone is a genuine troll, then hell-banning is a great way of dealing with it, because it maximizes the time wasted by the troll and minimizes the time used by the moderator. However, if the person isn't actually out-and-out to mess with your site, it sucks. I've seen lots of communities go down the tubes because the moderators get busy with life, and then Something Happens On The Forum, and moderators passive-aggressively go "fine, we're just gonna act like this, and if you don't want us to do that, then you should make the community act better!" Basically announcing that they are going to put in minimal effort to moderation, and the community definitely notices. Professional moderation, like HN uses, seems like the best way to go.

morganvachon 12y ago
Indeed, it's a situation where the needs of the many (HN community as a whole) outweigh the needs of the few (banned non-troll commentators). The danger lies in becoming such an elite, closed group due to blind moderation and banning even the most innocent members over a perceived slight, that the moderators themselves end up the trolls of what is left of the community. For example, there's a certain GNU/Linux distro that is maintained by a core group of devs who have become overtly hostile to any new users of their project, and actively seek to discourage "newbies" from seeking help and getting any benefit out of the project. One would think the toxic atmosphere would have killed the distro off long ago, yet it's maintaining popularity and even seeing an uptick in a certain niche community. I certainly don't understand how it thrives with such a rotten core; yes, it's overall a very well done distro, but even the best product normally can't survive that kind of cancer. That's not to say that HN would ever end up like that; indeed, from what I've seen they are doing an excellent job overall with maintaining and moderating this community. I just hope it continues to stay that way or improve, instead of going down a dark path towards chaos.

segmondy 12y ago

My account segmond got hell banned, it's a miracle that this is not. HN will downvote any comment that they don't like down to hell. An opinion that is disagreeable with is flagged, it's like the opposite of facebook like button. Dislike. You don't have to spam or be disruptive. I'm putting my account name on here so folks can look at it. I was new to HN, didn't know much, had no idea I was dead. :) This account get's a decent amount of flag too when I make unpopular opinion, I have to stop myself from censoring myself because the moment I feel like I can't talk or participate, I will just leave the community. If I can't express myself around a bunch of "hackers" then what's the point?