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PG constantly fucks around with the voting process to do things other than the obvious time-decay voting system where fresh content and fresh votes get a tempor
by blasdel 17y ago
PG constantly fucks around with the voting process to do things other than the obvious time-decay voting system where fresh content and fresh votes get a temporary boost.
Recently it's seemed like someone on the backend is manually demoting posts from the front page. That's better than the old policy of deleting them and sometimes hell-banning the poster, but it's still pretty anti-community.
Something that's gone on for a long time is that you'll get your account disenfranchised -- the voting buttons all still show up, and your votes get registered (can't vote again), but the points don't get added: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029776 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029776
- j_baker 17y agoDumb question. What exactly is the difference between a hell-banning and a normal banning?
- mbrubeck 17y agoHellbanned users don't know they are banned. They still see their own posts and comments, but no one else does.
- WilliamLP 17y agoThat explains the cold chill I sometimes feel down my neck when browsing this site.
- blasdel 17y agoWhen you're hell-banned, you aren't notified of it, you can continue to post links and comments, but you're the only one that sees them normally -- they're deleted for everyone except logged-in users that have [showdead] turned on. It was pioneered by the goons at SomethingAwful for dealing with problem users in a particularly lulzy way. It is rather effective for drive-by trolls that would just create another account and amp things up if they knew. But even SomethingAwful, with the most deliberately lulz-stoking moderators on the web, uses other methods almost exclusively: probation, timeouts, and normal banning. news.arc is uniquely capricious in that hell-banning is the only method in use