Stopping famous people from signing up is a good point. On the other hand the system is clearly broken now. > The karma metric is pretty transparent. You lear

Stopping famous people from signing up is a good point. On the other hand the system is clearly broken now. > The karma metric is pretty transparent. You learn very quickly which comments are and are not appreciated. Dropping a friendly comment to someone you see who hasn't caught on yet works, as well. This is not the case as it is currently implemented. If one of your first comments gets downvoted you get hellbanned. There is no chance to learn from your mistakes. Dropping a friendly comment doesn't work either because you cannot respond to hellbanned people. Do you have showdead on? Try it and you'll probably see that about half of the hellbanned people still posting invisible comments are legitimate. For example you will find 3 of those people commenting on this post, two of them having no idea that nobody is reading their comments. For example look at http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bshock http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bshock This guy has been banned for 2 downvoted comments and has been posting legitimate but invisible comments for over a year. You can clearly see the learning effects: his first couple of comments are not HN quality. Unfortunately by the time he got accustomed to HN he had been silenced.