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Not an uncommon practice, Jeff Atwood calls it "hellbanning": https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-

Not an uncommon practice, Jeff Atwood calls it "hellbanning": https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/

kortilla 7y ago
No, he calls it slowbanning. Hellbanning is when you let them keep posting but other people can’t see the posts. Hackernews hellbans as well and you can see the comments from the deplorables if you turn on “showdead” in your profile.
- tylerchilds 7y ago
  I've always thought people might catch on, since no one is engaging with their takes. I'm curious if letting bots do some markov responses might keep them in the dark a little longer.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - atoav 7y ago
    I think nowadays you might catch on because the culpit might not be identified to your site with both their phone and their PC or something among these lines.
  - phpnode 7y ago
    I see it far less frequently now (thanks @dang!), but a few years ago it wasn't uncommon to see shadow banned HN users continuing to post for years, talking into the void. Sometimes I'd look into their post history and so many of them had been banned for utterly trivial reasons, it was pretty sad.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      If I see an account that's been shadowbanned for years, and has consistently posted appropriately for maybe several months, I report it via the contact address.
    - ignoramous 7y ago
      Would you have a profile or two handy that I can take a look at? I left showdead on for a while but found it useless in terms of coming across interesting comments from such users. Thx.
      - jquast 7y ago
        I seem to remember being pretty upset when I found out Terry Davis of Temple OS was being shadowbanned. Maybe it was just temporary for a short period or a single comment, but I didn't like it. I found this (related?) poll https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823
        phpnode 7y ago
        Terry was permanently shadow-banned, the subject came up quite often. He suffered from schizophrenia and would make racist and paranoid comments about 80% of the time, but his remaining posts were often pretty technical / insightful. As the victim of an illness it seemed unkind that he was banned, but at the same time a lot of his output was obviously very offensive.
        redis_mlc 7y ago
        I only lurked on his comments, but I remember some to be very interesting and thought that his unique approach to OS design was food for thought Somebody should make a shrine of his lucid and technical posts. And also a book. Anybody know of such things?
        dang 7y ago
        Cases like that are why we introduced vouching, which allows the community to restore the good posts made by a banned account. Incidentally, if a banned account is making only good posts, we're happy to unban it. I often look at the recent commenting history of banned accounts in the hope of finding such cases, and users sometimes email us about them (as mirmir mentioned elsewhere in this thread). That's super helpful! One strange phenomenon is that there are banned accounts that post good comments, but revert to posting bad comments that break the site guidelines as soon as we unban them. Then we ban them again and their comments get good again...go figure. Any large-enough population sample includes a long tail of behaviors.
- downerending 7y ago
  I think of myself as hard-nosed, but I don't think I could be this cruel to someone.
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    Reading said comments may convince you otherwise.
- iscrewyou 7y ago
  Oh wow! Thank you! The setting was on for me. (By default? Or maybe I turned it on.) I just turned it off. Thanks for this suggestion.
  - ignoramous 7y ago
    Even if it was accidentally set on, one sees [dead] against shadow-banned, greyed-out comments.
- asjw 7y ago
  And that's the reason why arts don't follow these rules. Imagine Van Gogh on HN...
  - chinesempire 7y ago
    Unfortunately I can't upvote you I agree with the sentiment, shadowbanning is a passive aggressive way to hide communities problems under the carpet by hiding them from the public Banning is legit if done publicly with reasoning, so people can make a clear idea of what happened and why, like > you broke rule number 3 not when it is done just to keep "the community clean" without any explanation whatsoever I guess this is the reason why HN rules are so vague
- epanchin 7y ago
  I know that as shadowbanning. This is one of my favourite reddit posts on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_posting_for_three_years_and_just_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_postin...
  - r00fus 7y ago
    IIRC hellbanning is a variant of shadowbanning that prevents easy discovery of the banned status by putting all suspect accounts into the same "hell" invisible to normal users. This works well if you have a network of fake accounts from a single "persona" or ring of personas - by all their indications they can't see their own posts are being ignored. Notice: it's almost the exact response to the persona management software problem [1] (aka bots). [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
    - Klathmon 7y ago
      This also works incredibly well for cheaters in videogames. Give them their own queue with their own games with other cheaters to play against, and as long as nobody is cheating in a way that breaks the servers, they can play their own version of the game if they want without ruining the game for those who don't cheat.
      - sharken 7y ago
        Also used in the excellent TV series Mythic Quest :)
      - baddox 7y ago
        This reminds me of someone telling me that they are using cheat sites for an online Scrabble game because they suspected their opponent (a “friend”) was cheating. It’s hilarious to think that two humans are watching two instances of a likely optimal bot play against each other and rooting for their instance of the bot.
    - heartbeats 7y ago
- mirimir 7y ago
  Yep. And you can vouch for good comments from shadowbanned accounts, just as for manually flagged comments. Being rather paranoid, I check this account occasionally via Tor.
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  > deplorables Isn't this a pretty mean thing to say? Just making an account from tor is enough to get you shadowbanned in hn.
  - dang 7y ago
    That's not true. Software filters sometimes kill such comments, but the accounts themselves are unaffected, and moderators review the killed comments and unkill the clearly good ones, and mark such accounts legit to immunize their future posts from those filters. Also, users often vouch for comments that have been killed in this way, which restores them.
    - dependenttypes 7y ago
      My main issue was with the deplorables comment. I actually quite like the HN system of vouching. > and mark such accounts legit to immunize their future posts from those filters I remember seeing you restore a post from someone who made their account via tor and their comments were auto-deleted. Their next post was autodeleted in the same way, so I presume that this feature is buggy (or was, as this was quite a while ago).
      - dang 7y ago
        There might be other explanations. For example, if an account shows signs of being connected to previous banned accounts, we might unkill a good post, but not immunize the account overall, until it establishes more of a track record. I'm glad you like the vouching system! I still feel like it's the best single change we've made to HN since pg retired.
- dang 7y ago
  We only do that when an account doesn't have much history on HN and there's evidence of spamming or trolling. For established accounts, we tell people we've banned them and why. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20shadownban&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- xorand 7y ago
  Let me check it. If you see this pls vote or reply.
  - ajscanlan 7y ago
    ack
squizzeak 7y ago
I always referred to this practice as “tarpitting”, I was surprised to see nobody else here does!
- manicdee 7y ago
  “Tarpitting” is a specific type of network-layer defence which is not related to degradation of service. A tarpit will typically stretch out response time to network-layer and some application-layer communications in order to waste wallclock time of spammers.

Not an uncommon practice, Jeff Atwood calls it "hellbanning": https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/

kortilla 7y ago

No, he calls it slowbanning. Hellbanning is when you let them keep posting but other people can’t see the posts. Hackernews hellbans as well and you can see the comments from the deplorables if you turn on “showdead” in your profile.

tylerchilds 7y ago
I've always thought people might catch on, since no one is engaging with their takes. I'm curious if letting bots do some markov responses might keep them in the dark a little longer.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- atoav 7y ago
  I think nowadays you might catch on because the culpit might not be identified to your site with both their phone and their PC or something among these lines.
- phpnode 7y ago
  I see it far less frequently now (thanks @dang!), but a few years ago it wasn't uncommon to see shadow banned HN users continuing to post for years, talking into the void. Sometimes I'd look into their post history and so many of them had been banned for utterly trivial reasons, it was pretty sad.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    If I see an account that's been shadowbanned for years, and has consistently posted appropriately for maybe several months, I report it via the contact address.
  - ignoramous 7y ago
    Would you have a profile or two handy that I can take a look at? I left showdead on for a while but found it useless in terms of coming across interesting comments from such users. Thx.
    - jquast 7y ago
      I seem to remember being pretty upset when I found out Terry Davis of Temple OS was being shadowbanned. Maybe it was just temporary for a short period or a single comment, but I didn't like it. I found this (related?) poll https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823
      - phpnode 7y ago
        Terry was permanently shadow-banned, the subject came up quite often. He suffered from schizophrenia and would make racist and paranoid comments about 80% of the time, but his remaining posts were often pretty technical / insightful. As the victim of an illness it seemed unkind that he was banned, but at the same time a lot of his output was obviously very offensive.
        redis_mlc 7y ago
        I only lurked on his comments, but I remember some to be very interesting and thought that his unique approach to OS design was food for thought Somebody should make a shrine of his lucid and technical posts. And also a book. Anybody know of such things?
        dang 7y ago
        Cases like that are why we introduced vouching, which allows the community to restore the good posts made by a banned account. Incidentally, if a banned account is making only good posts, we're happy to unban it. I often look at the recent commenting history of banned accounts in the hope of finding such cases, and users sometimes email us about them (as mirmir mentioned elsewhere in this thread). That's super helpful! One strange phenomenon is that there are banned accounts that post good comments, but revert to posting bad comments that break the site guidelines as soon as we unban them. Then we ban them again and their comments get good again...go figure. Any large-enough population sample includes a long tail of behaviors.
downerending 7y ago
I think of myself as hard-nosed, but I don't think I could be this cruel to someone.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Reading said comments may convince you otherwise.
iscrewyou 7y ago
Oh wow! Thank you! The setting was on for me. (By default? Or maybe I turned it on.) I just turned it off. Thanks for this suggestion.
- ignoramous 7y ago
  Even if it was accidentally set on, one sees [dead] against shadow-banned, greyed-out comments.
asjw 7y ago
And that's the reason why arts don't follow these rules. Imagine Van Gogh on HN...
- chinesempire 7y ago
  Unfortunately I can't upvote you I agree with the sentiment, shadowbanning is a passive aggressive way to hide communities problems under the carpet by hiding them from the public Banning is legit if done publicly with reasoning, so people can make a clear idea of what happened and why, like > you broke rule number 3 not when it is done just to keep "the community clean" without any explanation whatsoever I guess this is the reason why HN rules are so vague
epanchin 7y ago
I know that as shadowbanning. This is one of my favourite reddit posts on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_posting_for_three_years_and_just_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_postin...
- r00fus 7y ago
  IIRC hellbanning is a variant of shadowbanning that prevents easy discovery of the banned status by putting all suspect accounts into the same "hell" invisible to normal users. This works well if you have a network of fake accounts from a single "persona" or ring of personas - by all their indications they can't see their own posts are being ignored. Notice: it's almost the exact response to the persona management software problem [1] (aka bots). [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
  - Klathmon 7y ago
    This also works incredibly well for cheaters in videogames. Give them their own queue with their own games with other cheaters to play against, and as long as nobody is cheating in a way that breaks the servers, they can play their own version of the game if they want without ruining the game for those who don't cheat.
    - sharken 7y ago
      Also used in the excellent TV series Mythic Quest :)
    - baddox 7y ago
      This reminds me of someone telling me that they are using cheat sites for an online Scrabble game because they suspected their opponent (a “friend”) was cheating. It’s hilarious to think that two humans are watching two instances of a likely optimal bot play against each other and rooting for their instance of the bot.
  - heartbeats 7y ago
mirimir 7y ago
Yep. And you can vouch for good comments from shadowbanned accounts, just as for manually flagged comments. Being rather paranoid, I check this account occasionally via Tor.
dependenttypes 7y ago
> deplorables Isn't this a pretty mean thing to say? Just making an account from tor is enough to get you shadowbanned in hn.
- dang 7y ago
  That's not true. Software filters sometimes kill such comments, but the accounts themselves are unaffected, and moderators review the killed comments and unkill the clearly good ones, and mark such accounts legit to immunize their future posts from those filters. Also, users often vouch for comments that have been killed in this way, which restores them.
  - dependenttypes 7y ago
    My main issue was with the deplorables comment. I actually quite like the HN system of vouching. > and mark such accounts legit to immunize their future posts from those filters I remember seeing you restore a post from someone who made their account via tor and their comments were auto-deleted. Their next post was autodeleted in the same way, so I presume that this feature is buggy (or was, as this was quite a while ago).
    - dang 7y ago
      There might be other explanations. For example, if an account shows signs of being connected to previous banned accounts, we might unkill a good post, but not immunize the account overall, until it establishes more of a track record. I'm glad you like the vouching system! I still feel like it's the best single change we've made to HN since pg retired.
dang 7y ago
We only do that when an account doesn't have much history on HN and there's evidence of spamming or trolling. For established accounts, we tell people we've banned them and why. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20shadownban&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
xorand 7y ago
Let me check it. If you see this pls vote or reply.
- ajscanlan 7y ago
  ack

squizzeak 7y ago

I always referred to this practice as “tarpitting”, I was surprised to see nobody else here does!

manicdee 7y ago
“Tarpitting” is a specific type of network-layer defence which is not related to degradation of service. A tarpit will typically stretch out response time to network-layer and some application-layer communications in order to waste wallclock time of spammers.