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To those of you addicted to Hacker News; I can offer this tip. Get a Hellban. It's not hard after all. I'll probally get hellbanned over this post? You wil

To those of you addicted to Hacker News; I can offer this tip. Get a Hellban. It's not hard after all. I'll probally get hellbanned over this post? You will find you will still pruse HN, but very rarely will you feel the need to contribute. Your time here will decrease. Hacker News does not need much improvement. It does seem like it's on the back end of it's business cycle though, like all current social sites? I used business cycle because I don't know the word for a social site's decline. Decline is too harsh a word. Maybe predictable conversations, and a bit of a echo chamber, is more appripro? Hacker News is still the best site for scientific conversation on the the internet though. It seems like we have hashed out the important scientific stuff, and most issues computer related. I'm so greatfull to the hard nosed scientists whom hang here, and take umbridge to unsupported claims. I really do appreciate you guys. You know who you are. You are usually the first one to comment on a study's flaw, or whether the Placebo Effect is rearing it's magical head. Graham should add a few more moderators though. Never give too much power to one person, and an owner. This Plus--if Graham pays more Moderators, he could write off the added expence? It could be his gift to humanity? Oh yea, block a person, but do away with hellbanning. It's wimpy, passive aggressive, weak move. I understand moderation, but just block a person. Don't let them rattle on to open air. I would like to see a few more political discussions though. Not a lot, but some. Maybe one every other week? Expose the political fakers, and hypocrites. Expose the political hacks on both sides. Track every dime both parties bring in by way of Lobbiests?

disgrunt 6y ago
For those of us unaware, what is a hellban?
- krapp 6y ago
  It's a ban designed to make it appear to the banned user that they aren't banned. The intent is to allow them to continue to post (so they don't make a new account and avoid the ban) unaware that their posts are unreadable by the rest of the community. It works, but it's extremely controversial. It used to be the case that talking about it (and making banned users aware of their status) could get you banned here, and vouching for banned users wasn't available until relatively recently. Some users have only discovered they were banned years after the fact.
  - dang 6y ago
    For many years now, we tell users that we're banning them when they have an established history on the site: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Shadowbanning is mostly for spammers and serial trolls. There's lots of past explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686672 and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20shadowban&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I think vouching dates from 2015. If anyone sees a banned account that's posting good comments, they're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. If the account has really corrected its ways, we're happy to unban it. Occasionally we notice one of these ourselves and unban it. It's on my list to look at the oldest banned accounts that are still posting; I just haven't gotten to it yet.
    - krapp 6y ago
      Things have been a lot more equitable since pg was running the show. Although to be fair sometimes you come along a bit late and people don't actually see your comment. If it's not still on the first page of their threads list they're probably never going to notice it. Maybe there should be a message when someone logs in to let them know what flags are against their account.
      - dang 6y ago
        Yeah, that's a problem. I'm often as much as a couple days behind in looking through flagged comments. I think if we build any more software around banning/penalties, it might be some kind of probation system, i.e. a series of temporary bans, maybe with exponential backoff, and with permanent bannage only as an end state. I can think of reasons why it might work better, including: (1) humans tend to do well with feedback loops; (2) it might feel less personal (in the bad sense of the word); (3) it would be easier for moderators to do a lot more of it. In the optimistic scenario, we'd get a better community and less ill feeling about getting moderated, which would be great. The current path is psychologically too hard and leads to burnout.
BrandonM 6y ago
> Maybe predictable conversations, and a bit of a echo chamber, is more appripro? [...] It seems like we have hashed out the important scientific stuff, and most issues computer related. I think you're totally right with the first sentence I've quoted. The second has some truth to it, but I think it's a more personal effect than you seem to be acknowledging. The most common complaint of long-time forum members is that the signal-to-noise ratio has gone down. In reality, the signal-to-noise ratio could stay the same, but for any individual community member, we will personally find less signal in the noise. The discussions will inevitably become predictable to us. When we first join a forum with a particular focus, we likely have an incredibly incomplete view of the topics being discussed, or at least that community's interpretations of those topics (some of which might change our mind). We'll have lots of epiphanies. We'll connect a lot of dots that we hadn't connected before. We'll have real world experiences that we can anchor to discussions in the forum, allowing us to bring our life context into the forum and the forum context into our lives. Over time, though, we'll be learning less and less from the forums. The forum discourse can initially advance somewhat as we come to useful consensus on some topics, and as the earlier members have more life experiences. For any forum that allows new members, the discourse is bound to hit a steady state of much more slowly evolving discourse. In the long run, forums likely evolve at roughly the same rate as society as whole. The forum still fills a very useful function for those new starry-eyed members who have a lot to learn and much room to grow. For them, the adventure and discourse and overall experience is nearly as good as it was for the early forum members. Meanwhile, those early members continue to grow at human rates, not society rates. We outgrow the forums. We start to see similar points over and over again, ones we've already argued to death and assessed for ourselves. We've personally experienced supporting and contradictory anecdotal evidence for many of the forum's consensus viewpoints. The "signal" at this point mostly comes from discussing entirely new events in the forum's focus area. The sorts of things where you might say, "I wonder what HN thinks about this?" Therein lies the rub. As we personally have discussed to death the technical topics that drew us to HN, we almost wish to give "the HN treatment" to broader areas, especially philosophy, politics, and other current events. But we are not experts in these areas. It might feel exciting to us to discuss these things with our peers, but to anyone looking in from the outside, we're a bunch of bumbling idiots who think we know it all. If these topics start to dominate the conversation, the forum is no longer interesting to newcomers. Foremost experts in these areas have little reason to visit the forum, so any advancing discourse is much slower than it was for the original forum topic. Sorry, I'm kind of thinking out loud in this comment. I guess my conclusion is that it's probably best to strive to keep the forum on topic, even if it gets boring for the oldtimers. I think it's totally fine for members to realize they've outgrown the forum and move onto other ways of spending their remaining time on this planet. We can take some satisfaction in the role that we played in the forum's early growth, and we can be grateful for the role that it played in our growth. And we can let the next generation muddle on in our stead, experiencing their own adventures while moving the center in their own direction.

disgrunt 6y ago

For those of us unaware, what is a hellban?

krapp 6y ago
It's a ban designed to make it appear to the banned user that they aren't banned. The intent is to allow them to continue to post (so they don't make a new account and avoid the ban) unaware that their posts are unreadable by the rest of the community. It works, but it's extremely controversial. It used to be the case that talking about it (and making banned users aware of their status) could get you banned here, and vouching for banned users wasn't available until relatively recently. Some users have only discovered they were banned years after the fact.
- dang 6y ago
  For many years now, we tell users that we're banning them when they have an established history on the site: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Shadowbanning is mostly for spammers and serial trolls. There's lots of past explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686672 and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20shadowban&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I think vouching dates from 2015. If anyone sees a banned account that's posting good comments, they're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. If the account has really corrected its ways, we're happy to unban it. Occasionally we notice one of these ourselves and unban it. It's on my list to look at the oldest banned accounts that are still posting; I just haven't gotten to it yet.
  - krapp 6y ago
    Things have been a lot more equitable since pg was running the show. Although to be fair sometimes you come along a bit late and people don't actually see your comment. If it's not still on the first page of their threads list they're probably never going to notice it. Maybe there should be a message when someone logs in to let them know what flags are against their account.
    - dang 6y ago
      Yeah, that's a problem. I'm often as much as a couple days behind in looking through flagged comments. I think if we build any more software around banning/penalties, it might be some kind of probation system, i.e. a series of temporary bans, maybe with exponential backoff, and with permanent bannage only as an end state. I can think of reasons why it might work better, including: (1) humans tend to do well with feedback loops; (2) it might feel less personal (in the bad sense of the word); (3) it would be easier for moderators to do a lot more of it. In the optimistic scenario, we'd get a better community and less ill feeling about getting moderated, which would be great. The current path is psychologically too hard and leads to burnout.

BrandonM 6y ago

> Maybe predictable conversations, and a bit of a echo chamber, is more appripro? [...] It seems like we have hashed out the important scientific stuff, and most issues computer related. I think you're totally right with the first sentence I've quoted. The second has some truth to it, but I think it's a more personal effect than you seem to be acknowledging. The most common complaint of long-time forum members is that the signal-to-noise ratio has gone down. In reality, the signal-to-noise ratio could stay the same, but for any individual community member, we will personally find less signal in the noise. The discussions will inevitably become predictable to us. When we first join a forum with a particular focus, we likely have an incredibly incomplete view of the topics being discussed, or at least that community's interpretations of those topics (some of which might change our mind). We'll have lots of epiphanies. We'll connect a lot of dots that we hadn't connected before. We'll have real world experiences that we can anchor to discussions in the forum, allowing us to bring our life context into the forum and the forum context into our lives. Over time, though, we'll be learning less and less from the forums. The forum discourse can initially advance somewhat as we come to useful consensus on some topics, and as the earlier members have more life experiences. For any forum that allows new members, the discourse is bound to hit a steady state of much more slowly evolving discourse. In the long run, forums likely evolve at roughly the same rate as society as whole. The forum still fills a very useful function for those new starry-eyed members who have a lot to learn and much room to grow. For them, the adventure and discourse and overall experience is nearly as good as it was for the early forum members. Meanwhile, those early members continue to grow at human rates, not society rates. We outgrow the forums. We start to see similar points over and over again, ones we've already argued to death and assessed for ourselves. We've personally experienced supporting and contradictory anecdotal evidence for many of the forum's consensus viewpoints. The "signal" at this point mostly comes from discussing entirely new events in the forum's focus area. The sorts of things where you might say, "I wonder what HN thinks about this?" Therein lies the rub. As we personally have discussed to death the technical topics that drew us to HN, we almost wish to give "the HN treatment" to broader areas, especially philosophy, politics, and other current events. But we are not experts in these areas. It might feel exciting to us to discuss these things with our peers, but to anyone looking in from the outside, we're a bunch of bumbling idiots who think we know it all. If these topics start to dominate the conversation, the forum is no longer interesting to newcomers. Foremost experts in these areas have little reason to visit the forum, so any advancing discourse is much slower than it was for the original forum topic. Sorry, I'm kind of thinking out loud in this comment. I guess my conclusion is that it's probably best to strive to keep the forum on topic, even if it gets boring for the oldtimers. I think it's totally fine for members to realize they've outgrown the forum and move onto other ways of spending their remaining time on this planet. We can take some satisfaction in the role that we played in the forum's early growth, and we can be grateful for the role that it played in our growth. And we can let the next generation muddle on in our stead, experiencing their own adventures while moving the center in their own direction.