4 ms·
apologies if this is a dumb question, but what does 'hellbanned' mean? i understand folks' concern about dubious intentions, but if it's any consolation, this i
by bananarama44 15y ago
apologies if this is a dumb question, but what does 'hellbanned' mean? i understand folks' concern about dubious intentions, but if it's any consolation, this is merely a class project from Clay Shirky's Designing Conversational Spaces class at NYU.
- polyfractal 15y agoHellbanned means the poster sees his own comments as normal, but no one else can see them. Someone who is hellbanned typically does not know they are banned until someone tells them (or they eventually get suspicious of no one commenting on their comments or up/downvoting). Frankly I find the idea of hellbanning childish, but it has a long history on the internet.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y agoYou mean for people like Losethos?
- polyfractal 15y agoI'm not familiar with Losethos...mind explaining? A particularly egregious user?
- mjhall 15y agoTake a look at his comment history (turn showdead on first)[1]. He's a somewhat eccentric character. [1]:http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- xxpor 15y agoHe wrote a 64 bit OS from scratch where the shell uses C as it's scripting language, and I believe everything runs in Ring 0. Also no protected or virtual memory. So if you go over on an array index, well you could screw up some of the kernel memory space. Brilliant, but crazy. See above, and read some of his comments. He seems to be some sort of fundamentalist christian, and IIRC his comments were about saving everyone though Jesus or some such thing.
- acuozzo 15y ago> Brilliant, but crazy. See above, and read some of his comments. He seems to be some sort of fundamentalist christian, and IIRC his comments were about saving everyone though Jesus or some such thing. This isn't the whole picture. He's, unfortunately, schizophrenic. Read [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642308 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642308] and [http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html].
- bricestacey 15y agoI thought the same thing. I find it shameful.
- ChrisNorstrom 15y agoPoor guy, I used to be like that. That's a type of brain washing only Reddit/Athiesm/ and 4chan/b/ can fix.
- _delirium 15y ago> Frankly I find the idea of hellbanning childish That's not too surprising, since the name (though possibly not the practice?) originated at SomethingAwful, and SA bans are pretty deliberately intended to be a mixture of serious and prankish, with a bit of arbitrariness thrown in.
- zacharycohn 15y agoIt's not childish, it's used to defeat trolls. If you ban a troll, they'll realize it next time they try to log in and it says "YOU HAVE BEEN BANNED." But if you hellban them, then they'll log in just fine, they'll post just fine... but no one will respond to their posts. Eventually they'll get bored because they can't get a rise out of anyone and they'll leave.
- Shank 15y agoSimilarly, some sites use "discouragement," where the site will run fine, but on their machine it'll behave slowly and sometimes fail completely (bad page loads, excessively long waits then nothing happens, etc).
- Negitivefrags 15y agoSometimes I wonder if PayPal is using this approach.
- polyfractal 15y agoFair point. I guess it's easier to hellban than block them off the site or keep removing their new usernames.
- zacharycohn 15y agoEasy to block a single account. Very time consuming to continually block the same person over and over and over again - especially on a large and very active forum where the admins don't read every post on every thread.
- huhtenberg 15y agoThat's called "shadowban" in my neck of the woods.
- jdpage 15y agoI've also seen it called a "ninjaban".
- WiseWeasel 15y agoI think it should be called ghosting. He dropped a hard J, so we ghosted him on the spot.