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I almost got banned from Hacker News
- ggm 5y agoWithout a comment from the people who COULD ban, the word ban has somewhat loaded context here. Banning has a permanency ring to it. Your context goes to "I almost got temporarily shut out of" as much as banning surely? Or is there something I missed about the longer-term?
- selfhoster11 5y agoDepending on how good the support is in the part of the service, a temporary ban can quickly turn into a permanent one.
- geerlingguy 5y ago> That's basically the equivalent of a capital offense on HN and we ban accounts and sites that do it. I interpreted that as having some sort of permanence attached.
- Beltalowda 5y agoThe typical message that dang leaves when banning an account is something like: "Since we've asked you many times to use HN as intended and you've continued not to, I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html." I assume this applies to all but the most egregious cases (e.g. posting overtly racist nonsense, only posting flamebait/spam, and stuff like that), even when not explicitly stated.
- geerlingguy 5y agoThat's quite generous then, I'm mostly basing assumptions on other communities where moderators assume the worst automatically, and you might as well talk to a brick wall... but thinking on it that's not the case on this site. Most of the time ;)
- EdwardDiego 5y agoAs someone who got on the wrong side of dang, he's a model of light handed moderation. And because he's so reasonable, I feel like I owe it to him personally to stay away from the fanning flamewars behaviour he flagged.
- ars 5y agoI've had the same experience, and his advice has improved my writing. The main thing he advised me: You don't have to "bash" the opposing viewpoint in order to write your own. Just write your own. There are a few things I disagree with him about, but as he's the mod, and I'm not, I accept it and try to avoid those topics.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago"he's the mod and I'm not" certainly brings a lot of civility to a space. Most speculation of "why are people assholes on the internet" tends to center around anonymity, or not seeing each other face to face, but I think the toxicity can also be explained as "who's going to stop me", like 8 year olds seeing what they can get away with. Anywhere comments are simply reported to a faceless beauracracy is rife for abuse.
- robgibbons 5y agoBack in 2015 I decided to bot my HN account for fun and karma. I wrote a python script called karmabum that scanned a few dozen RSS feeds every 30 seconds to catch fresh articles. When it saw a new article, it launched the Submit page with the form parameters pre-populated. At that point a TamperMonkey userscript took over and submitted the form for me. Karmabum ran for something like 24 hours, and got me some good karma, before users started complaining and I was quickly thereafter banned. Luckily, dang is very gracious and un-banned my account after I reached out, and to this day I have never botted my HN account again. These days I use those skills for good, writing E2E tests :)
- NicoJuicy 5y agoHaha, i have a more manual process. A webapp like HN, but crawls RSS. There's a "Post to HN" button, when i think there's something interesting. So it's still a "manual process". I think jacquesm will appreciate this one: https://ibb.co/BsZ95W5 https://ibb.co/BsZ95W5
- hutrdvnj 5y agoI think you were hitting some kind of limit regarding submits per day. I think if you were to throttle such a bot to maybe a few submissions from serious sources per week, then it would likely work. I would guess that many submissions to /newest are indeed autogenerated.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"I would guess that many submissions to /newest are indeed autogenerated" Either this, or the humans run mentally on bot mode.
- walrus01 5y agoIt seems that a malicious person A who has a strong dislike or enmity for person B's projects could do some real harm by buying upvotes/clicks/likes for person B's projects, getting them banned from various services. Make it look like person B naively went out and paid a third party upvote/promotion service, and make it obvious enough to be noticeable. to use some old internet terminology, make it look like a joe-job astroturf?
- beckingz 5y agoApparently this was the move for a while on amazon: buy upvotes for the people who are listed higher than you so they get removed.
- smegma2 5y agoTwitch famously does not ban people for botting unless they have evidence that the streamer themselves ordered the bots. https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/how-to-handle-view-follow-bots?language=en_US#handle https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/how-to-handle-view-follow-b...
- nitwit005 5y agoI'm a bit doubtful, as even gaining real followers rapidly has apparently been a problem. That happened around 2 months ago with new members of the Hololive streaming group, as all their fans followed the new accounts.
- 5y ago
- asfarley 5y agoI’ve always found your work to be done with high integrity and I don’t consider your posts to be spammy at all. Please continue posting and I hope that HN would consider some type of moderation that allows your content.
- dang 5y agoHN does allow that content: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=jeffgeerling.com%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- gabrielsroka 5y ago> is it still just [dang] and sctb? As far as I can tell, Scott left in 2019, so it's just dang.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoThere are other mods, but he's the only public one. (He's said as much.)
- gabrielsroka 5y agoI stand corrected. And according to this HN poll, 8% of HN users believe he's a lizard: https://gabrielsroka.github.io/hnpoll.html?id=29755614 https://gabrielsroka.github.io/hnpoll.html?id=29755614
- nefitty 5y agoAbsolutely wrong. He's the first sentient AI but he prefers that that personal side of his life remains private. Oh woops.
- earleybird 5y agoI would still very much appreciate an AMA with Dang
- preetamjinka 5y agoThere is a New Yorker article written about them: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... Good read!
- Zababa 5y agoThat's twice as much as the "regular" lizard constant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
- bm5k 5y agoWait so should I upvote this or not? Thanks for all of the work you do.
- mikewarot 5y agoThanks for that peek behind the scenes. It's good to have a sense of how things work.
- SloopJon 5y agoDiscussion here is such that I sometimes read the submitted link as an afterthought. Apart from the occasional distraction of a comment by dang, I had operated under the polite fiction that this was the result of self moderation. Jeff's account leaves me conflicted. I resent heavy-handed, unaccountable moderation, and boy would I be pissed if I was accused of stealing accounts to upvote a HN story of all things. On the other hand, if the alternative is regressing to, say, USENET, what can I say?
- vfulco2 5y agoI am glad things got straightened out. OP is one of the good guys. Very intriguing posts on Raspberry Pi over the years.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y agoOh, "geerling" I know you, I used your stuff in the Ansible galaxy.
- caaqil 5y ago> Enough people read /newest that you should take no upvotes as a sign the content just wasn't as interesting as you thought Umm, no. Sometimes, it's just luck and timing. Many posts that are interesting hit/stay on the front page the second time someone posts it. I don't think enough people browse the /newest queue. More people (myself included!) should browse /newest more often.
- bravetraveler 5y agoI'm one that doesn't use newest, honestly... I think I just like having my feeds a little curated Scrolling newest submissions feels like digging for gold when I can just walk to the bank Not that I disagree, just some context to offer. The internet is too big of a hose
- Jaruzel 5y ago/newest isn't about passive reading of the posts though. It's about upvoting the ones that are worthy in the aim to get them to a wider audience.
- bravetraveler 5y agoI can get that, I didn't look at it from this angle Sounds a bit like work, appreciate y'all
- samwillis 5y agoI often find myself on /newest when I’m spending the day trying to “complete the internet”. It tends to fall after reading the full front page, all of twitter and various news websites, but before I resort to Reddit…
- gtsop 5y agoNot sure if I should upvote this, could make his case worst :p
- ksec 5y ago> X was heavily upvoted by a criminal spam service that steals accounts from HN users and then sells upvotes and comments using the stolen accounts. That's basically the equivalent of a capital offense on HN and we ban accounts and sites that do it. That to me means HN front page has a lot economic value. It is sometimes hard to judge HN, because by numbers it doesn't seems that big, but by impact sometimes it surprises me.
- lostlogin 5y agoWhat made the spam service criminal?
- geerlingguy 5y agoI think criminal in the eyes of 'Internet etiquette'. As well as the T&C for having an account on most sites. But probably not enforceable in a court of law.
- code_duck 5y agoI’d presume the “steals accounts” part.
- bpodgursky 5y agoI suspect a well-timed front-page HN post with a lot of engagement could move a new fundraising valuation by tens or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"It is sometimes hard to judge HN, because by numbers it doesn't seems that big, but by impact sometimes it surprises me." It is about the audience, who comes here, to enjoy the crowd prefiltered content and comments, that is usually way higher than the average. There are quite some interesting (and rich or otherwise influential) people reading here. So if you manage to bot upvote a submission to the frontpage - it looks like the hacker spirit supports it. Powerful guerilla marketing. So I think it is not surprising, that it is tried at times, but according to dang(moderator), it happens way less, than people do expect.
- lamontcg 5y ago> Munin couldn't even catch up He's still using Munin in 2022? That's clearly the real story here. Commence nerdfight...
- geerlingguy 5y agoIf it works, it works. I've been running a couple Munin servers for like 10 or 15 years, and they're still happy on a 512 MB VPS!
- travelhead 5y ago
- unethical_ban 5y agoI'm drunk so don't expect total coherence. My hn name is based on the fact my original account got banned for stupid reasons. And once or twice in the years since, I have had an email with dang or a comment thread. My hill to die on is good faith. I think dang does. I think any system is imperfect, but that he does a good job of changing bias and filtering noise. To be a bit flippant: i see plenty of right wing chatter i find ludicrous, but it isn't deleted. Which is good, and proves the point. Dissenting views presented with a different message, without insulting users, and said in good faith should never be deleted.
- xupybd 5y agoI don't think moderation here has a political bias. They avoid by banning all controversially political content. It keeps the signal to noise ratio high and avoid a lot of strife. I've adopted this policy for a few relationships in real life. That said I do hold strong political views that sometimes land me in close to anti social behavior.
- echopurity 5y ago[flagged]
- vidarh 5y agoI've literally quoted Marx here on multiple occasions without problem when relevant to a discussion. The last bit being key.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
- RealStickman_ 5y agoI've read the thread. I also looked at your post and comments history. You've made your point over the past few days. Many people and, most importantly, dang seem to disagree with you. At what point would it be better to drop this topic and move on?
- nanoscopic 5y ago
- thevagrant 5y agoI've found so much value from your posts over the years (and books). Interesting situation, glad you didn't get banned!
- cinntaile 5y agoI sometimes read newest, but the signal to noise ratio is pretty low there unfortunately.
- echopurity 5y ago
- bannedbybros 5y ago
- dang 5y ago> They'll never moderate this place openly. https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gavinray 5y agoI don't understand how Dang can possibly moderate all the content on this site, all the time. Somehow he does though. 8th wonder of the world.
- Markoff 5y agoisn't it possible Dang is just shared account by multiple mods?
- tverbeure 5y agoI blog about electronics, roughly every other month. Sometimes it’s about simple equipment repairs, but more often it’s esoteric stuff like JTAG debug interfaces. A few of my blog posts have hit the HN front page. I never submit my new blog posts to HN, because I don’t need to: literally within minutes after announcing a new blog post on Twitter, somebody does that for me. Not always the same person either, and I have no idea who they are. It’s very convenient, and nobody can accuse me of self promotion. :-)
- loudtieblahblah 5y agoThis post is meant to distract from the fact he operates these other Twitter and hackernews accounts. ;-)
- pictur 5y ago"Unlike many other communities, HN is still relevant and moderated enough that spammy behavior is almost always caught and punished." :)
- tssva 5y agoI'm going to risk the downvote wrath but geerlingguy's rate of self-posting has annoyed me in the past. I did notice that the rate had dropped recently and am glad dang took proactive steps to communicate with geerlingguy to that end. That being said I am sorry you had to go through this recent experience and certainly never thought you should be banned.
- bogomipz 5y agoIs there not a double standard going on here? Why is that an individual is almost banned for "spammy" behavior yet it seems that it is OK for a company to aggressively post to HN? I will give you an example - Cloudflare. Their CTO has posted to HN 7 times in the last two weeks. And his submissions are always promotional[1]. This individual posts something about Cloudflare every few days and sometimes even submits more than one Cloudflare post in a single day. This has been going on for years. As far as I can see Jeff Geerling isn't even selling anything. Are there different rules for companies vs individuals? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jgrahamc https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jgrahamc
- Anthony-G 5y agoKey take-away for me: > dang is superhuman; I honestly have no idea how he and the rest of the tiny group (is it still just him and sctb?) that moderates HN keeps it a mostly civil place. It’s the excellent moderation that makes Hacker News the only Internet forum that I regularly read – or occasionally contribute to.