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I support hellbanning. The reason you use hellbanning is not because you don't want to deal with complaints, but to prevent people from simply making new accou

by emmett 15y ago

I support hellbanning. The reason you use hellbanning is not because you don't want to deal with complaints, but to prevent people from simply making new accounts and coming back to troll more. Does it completely prevent this? No, a very determined griefer can easily run a second account on a second IP and check to see if/when they've been hellbanned, or just make new accounts all the time on principle. There's certainly collateral damage, and I can see the argument that cost/benefit is off. But it's not like the policy is set out of laziness.

lotharbot 15y ago
> Does it completely prevent this? No But, of course, it's only a part of a larger system. Along with hellbans, we have downvotes, flags, comments from high-karma users showing up higher on the page, algorithms to detect voting rings and sockpuppets, and so on. All of these things combine to make it very difficult to be an effective troll on HN. Trollish comments normally end up with poor visibility and therefore low engagement from other users, which essentially starves the trolls.