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User returns after 100k-hours ban to continue conversation that got them banned
- 0xbadc0de5 2y agoThey had a long time to think of a clever rebuttal. Hopefully it was a good one.
- adr1an 2y agoLast sentence of article says he was proven to be right ~8 years ago. That's the most interesting bit to me.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago[flagged]
- ClumsyPilot 2y agoDedication?
- dartos 2y agoHuman behavior is interesting It’s also pc gamer
- x86x87 2y agoI would say that at this point it's trolling/comedy. for maximum effect I would ban them for 200k hours now.
- Arnt 2y agoThe poster might, perhaps, think that some HN posters will feel that this is relevant to them? I'd upvote Etherwind. Well done.
- coldtea 2y agoFor the obvious reasons. What is interesting to you? Talk about QM or compiler internals? Celebrity gossip? There are way more interesting things in the world, and this is one of those. This is a forum for hackers and startup types. Long lasting flame wars and user behavior in forums are already in the set of topics of interest. Someone returning to a thread after a 100k hour ban is by itself hugely amusing. Besides, posts don't get on the home page based on some personal or objective criterium for "interesting-ness". They get on the first page based on voting.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- indymike 2y agoWas someone wrong on the internet again?
- Xenoamorphous 2y agohttps://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/
- fragmede 2y ago100k hours = 11 years, 334 days, and 17 hours
- adito 2y agoThat doesn't sound right. "2024-07-14 9:04 am BST" - "2013-02-14 10:24 pm BST" equals 11 years, 149 days, 18 hours, 43 minutes (it is 100,018 hours as mentioned in the article)
- Brian_K_White 2y ago100,000 hours equals how many hours again?
- 8372049 2y agoI think that the time between ban and new post, which is 100,018 hours, was less than the other user's claim about how long 100,000 hours is. In other words, if 100,018 = x, then 100,000 can't be greater than x.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoah ok thanks, yeah I didn't follow that
- tetris11 2y ago> In a Google Doc shared with the thread via social media, our hero explained how posting in SA's community had been an important part of his life, how he had done a lot of growing up and a lot of mental healing in the intervening 100,000 hours, and how he now regretted his life as an infamously abrasive poster. It sounds like someone grew out of their 20s and mellowed out in their 30s. A tale as old as time.
- jsheard 2y agoThat could sum up SA as a whole. The culture there has shifted a lot over time, but not due to an influx of new users, it's the same people who have been posting for upwards of a decade and have (mostly) grown up. The founder Lowtax refused to grow up but, well, you know the story and now the site is under new management.
- lelandfe 2y agoSo, I didn’t know the story - turns out Lowtax passed - but in searching I found a bemusing internet history of how Lowtax’s “banning of hentai on SA [was] ‘The Archduke Ferdinand Assassination moment that lead to QAnon’” https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qro1ir/comment/hk967mm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qro1ir/comment/...
- jsheard 2y agoThe short version of events as I recall is that Lowtax was basically admin in absentia for years, only occasionally showing up to beg for money while the volunteer staff actually ran the show, until he was accused of domestic abuse by his then-partner which followed a pattern of similar accusations by his two previous partners. That led to a revolt by the users and other staff, which pressured Lowtax into selling the site to one of the other long time admins and parting ways. The new owner revealed that the site was in fact financially stable, contrary to Lowtaxes fearmongering, probably because he had been skimming donations for personal expenses. Then Lowtax killed himself a year later.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
- chubot 2y ago11 years is pretty good, but ... 4 years ago, I discovered that a flame war I had witnessed in rec.music.makers.percussion in the early 2000's was still going on after one side DIED https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24772142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24772142 In 2000, Rob Schuh was already infamous for the flames: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.makers.percussion/c/aA5QKwtkOrw https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.makers.percussion/c/aA... The Robert Schuh File; How to Not Win Friends and Influence People. Off Topic, extremely long, and not pretty. also occassionally posted at alt.tonya-harding --those who have chosen to guard themselves against Rob Schuh have done so with just cause. If you have been bothered, taunted, insulted, attacked, cursed at, lied to, lied about, by one Robert Schuh, welcome to the club! --- I believe he passed away around ~2010; people were celebrating his death in ~2012, and he continued to be mentioned until 2021. https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.makers.percussion/search?q=schuh https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.makers.percussion/sear... I mentioned in that thread that Schuh was a very interesting character: https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/drum-and-drummer-6431057 https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/drum-and-drummer-643105... A genius drummer, drum builder, bodybuilder, steroid user (when it was legal), convicted felon, a sufferer of chronic illness, and epic Usenet flamewar participant.
- tommaho 2y agoWow! I remember him from misc.fitness.weights!
- benry1 2y agoI tried to return to my Habbo Hotel account in 2016 after a 10 year ban. After some struggling to login, I contacted support, and found out that they delete any account banned for more than SIX MONTHS! I waited 9.5 years to log into an account that didn’t exist. RIP “Mr. Funnyshoes”
- doublerabbit 2y agoOof, I still have mine from 2003. 14 Year old me, cute. ArtMoney with a filter pack that allowed you to place furni in walls. You'd get room rights and then grief the place and you couldn't get them out without the same script. Same as rigging someone's doorbell to TNT in Minecraft. I miss those days.
- moffkalast 2y agoAccount's closed due to bans.
- flakes 2y agoThat game still exists? Back in 2005 I figured out how to log in on multiple Habbo accounts at once. I would run casino rooms using the dice and use a mob of clones to make it look like real players are winning and betting big. If an actual real player ever bet and won, I would kick them, tear down the whole room, transfer the items to new accounts, and start it up fresh. I probably had a few dozen accounts banned.
- aspenmayer 2y agoI love this story. This is basically the plot of The Sting (1973).
- alecsm 2y agoI don't know about Habbo but I've seen several games that look like it. Apparently some people use them as a virtual office.
- znpy 2y agoIf i ever get to work at microsoft, i'll try and get my original hotmail account back
- yashg 2y agoI was also also once banned from a forum for a few years. I kept going back there, never created a new account. Just waiting for the years to pass. It was not some crusade to get back, I was just curious and every few years when I would remember, I would check out the site. Until one day the site disappeared. It would have been fun to be able to log back in and just say "I am back".
- newsclues 2y agoI used to get banned from a forum, would use vpn to create a new account and identity with a new character and be a helpful poster until I had access to the social part of the forum and would immediately make a hilarious post with “I am back”.
- vasco 2y agoThere's a few of these characters in every SA-like forum, in a portuguese one, one of the major memes of the forum is that 99% of the accounts were alt-accounts (or "clones" as they were called there) of this one guy that was an edgy meme lord - for the same reason - avoiding bans. This thread reminded me of so much lost lore.
- fiatpandas 2y agoAround 6 years ago I was messing with my HN settings, and accidentally set my minaway to the equivalent to 6~ years (I set it to a random number w/o bothering to read what it did). My first comment post-self-ban was much less epic though.
- googh 2y agoJust curious: Why didn't you email the moderators?
- munchler 2y agoI was really hoping this was your first comment in 6 years, but alas not.
- magnat 2y agoThere is now a protection, you can't set it to more than 9999. :)
- TeMPOraL 2y agoOh no :(. Some time ago, I asked 'dang to ban my account for a month or something, as I was trying a HN detox. He told me to set minaway to some stupidly high number, and e-mail HN when I'm ready to come back. I typed some digits and banned myself for the next couple thousand years. In reality, it took me ~year to decide to come back, after finally understanding that blocking HN only causes me to seek out inferior forms of Internet use.
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoSo much this — I just end up looking at YouTube Shorts or something of that kind if I can’t browse HN. It’s the reason I’ve always removed the noprocrast option even after enabling it for some time.
- whimsicalism 2y agoYour account has been commenting continuously since it was created in 2010 e: totally wrong, my bad
- 38 2y agoI am banned from stack overflow for 100 years. I have over 100k rep on the site. I was banned because of a rollback war on one of my own posts. It's probably for the best, the site is pretty much dog shit these days, from the cruel moderation to the rampant bullying and flood of crap questions.
- madamelic 2y agoI miss SO. I spent a good amount of time on there as a 15 - 17 year old thinking the stats would mean something to a future employer. I remember revering Jon Skeet. I would post questions that I couldn't crack and I'd usually get a quick reply with someone explaining kindly and in-depth about the issue. Barely into college was when they started auto-closing and marking as duplicates along with mods being little snotnoses. Big miss. I genuinely think volunteer / unelected mods are the downfall of any forum. On my backlog of ideas, I have "democratic Reddit"... doubtful I'll ever do it but if anyone wants to: there you go (the concept being mods are elected by and can be removed from their roles by a vote of active posters) I am not sure HN's mod situation but my understanding is that it is essentially just two people and they are paid employees of YC.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoI would like to learn more about your ideas for solving the mod problem. Although I do think it’s unrealistic to overcome the network effects of existing huge platforms. When a site like Reddit has tens of millions of users, I personally think it should be regulated like a utility. They should not be able to just ban users arbitrarily, when they’re just operating a communication service effectively, and one protected from competition by network effects.
- mncharity 2y ago> On my backlog of ideas, I have "democratic Reddit" Hybrid computer-human social computing might permit that and much else. Consider a CS break-room candy machine which bribes undergraduates to grade CS 101 exam answers (eg [1]). It learns the characteristics, the strengths and weaknesses, of the graders, the gradees, the answers, and the questions. And can use highly targeted redundant cross-checks to address uncertainty. Eg "graders are giving this answer very different partial credit, so I'll show it to someone who has a history of doing partial credit well". An intelligently-applied small-integer redundancy of novice graders can thus emulate scarcer expert graders. And processes can be crafted from a mix of tooling and AI and humans - "this answer was left blank, and this one is clearly right, but this one has higher uncertainty, so involve wetware here". So one could do "democratic" tracking of poster culture. Or elected mods. Or mods with rich AI tooling. Or sampled direct democracy. Or eternal-September filtering. Or anchor to a subculture defined by individuals or policy. Or... whatever. Or perhaps even allow colocated participants to live in their own little flexibly-specified worlds, with preferences on topics and people and thread characteristics - my netflix isn't yours, so why are we eyeballing similar threads on this page? Entangling location with personal interests seems so... "You are in a library and interested in topic X. So leave the library and drive across town to the library". At least this all seemed a rich space of possibilities... more than decade ago. Someone else will have to comment on why that seeming opportunity seems so little mined. [1] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bjoern/papers/heimerl-umati-chi2012.pdf https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bjoern/papers/heimerl-umat...
- alecco 2y agoI wonder what a second HN with a $10 fee would look like.
- arnaudsm 2y agoX did the same experiment last year. $10 won't stop spammers and trolls
- hollerith 2y ago>$10 won't stop spammers. Are you sure? It sure seems to me like it would if every spam spree resulted in account shutdown with the result that to continue to spam, the spammer had to pay another $10. I think the argument you want is that it discourages desirable signups too much.
- defrost 2y agoDunno - here's a list of 38 bots currently (last 4 hours) active on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41024612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41024612 part of a larger network. The cost is perhaps $500 to have a group that can cordinate votes to raise the profile of posts (for marketing and other reasons), to downvote | flag negative coments, etc. With AI such things can fly more and more under the radar and will be seen by some as a valid expense for the gain they seek.
- hollerith 2y ago> a group that can cordinate votes to raise the profile of posts Are we calling that spamming now?
- defrost 2y agoRead the comments made by the listed accounts in the past few hours and describe their content.
- LinuxBender 2y ago
- nickpeterson 2y agoThere is great comedy in resuming some argument after great delay as if no time has passed, the pettier the better. I’m still waiting for a ban to end on my favorite CS 1.6 server so I can go back in and point out that people that awp mid on dust2 suck and probably have no friends.
- andrepd 2y agoIn a not so amusing story, there was a scholar that was persecuted, suffered violence, and finally fled Italy in the 1920s. Once the war ended he was reinstated as a professor, and—a quarter of a century after being purged from his post—returned to his now war-torn country. His first lecture began thus: "As I was saying in our previous lecture, ..."
- Yawrehto 2y agoWhich scholar?
- andrepd 2y agoI had to search the book where I read it, and this is the guy :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaetano_Salvemini https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaetano_Salvemini
- aspenmayer 2y agoWhat was the book?
- andrepd 2y agoIt's in Portuguese, no translation I'm afraid x) https://www.wook.pt/livro/agora-agora-e-mais-agora-colecao-7-volumes-rui-tavares/29428369 https://www.wook.pt/livro/agora-agora-e-mais-agora-colecao-7... Six less well-known periods of the history of the past 1000 years, from a scholar of the Islamic golden age to political polarisation in Dante's Italy to the upheavals of WWII, with an always-present unifying undercurrent: the notion of human rights.
- worksonmine 2y ago> While it's funny to imagine it cancelled, in all seriousness I don't think it'll be out before 2016 tbh. Would be happy to be proven wrong. I guess we'll wait and see. What a strange thing to post in 2024 after a 10 year ban. Makes me wonder if it's a bot with a message stuck in queue and it's been trying until now. Far-fetched I know but not as unlikely as a human doing the same thing.
- 8372049 2y agoThe joke is that he is pretending to be stuck in time 11 years ago, while we in 2024 know perfectly well what actually happened in 2016.
- johnnyanmac 2y agokeeping a local machine up for 11 years (or even spinning up a cloud task for this one esoteric purpose) would be even more impressive than just keeping a reminder in google calendar and logging in. I certainly know I have none of the same hardware I had in 2013. That was 4 laptops, 6 phones, and 2 console generations ago.
- tsss 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoNot sure why you’re downvoted. The shaping of opinions that today’s moderation is, has lots of parallels to societal control in authoritarian regimes - think USSR or China after the cultural revolution
- saagarjha 2y ago[flagged]
- neverokay 2y ago3/5 Major American political topics enter the chat.
- optimalsolver 2y agoThis is why we need heavenbanning: https://x.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561 https://x.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561
- Alifatisk 2y agoIsn't it kinda dangerous or inhumane to isolate a user with ai-generated response that agrees with their views on everything?
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoYes shadow banning and variants that go beyond are inhumane. It’s like something you would expect in black mirror
- swayvil 2y agoYeah, it's deeply evil. But that's how the "lovers of power" think. No hell is too awful for anybody who dares cross them.
- systemtest 2y agoReminds me of someone who got shadow banned upon registration without knowing it and after months of people not responding to his helpful and useful replies finally found out about it. I find it to be pretty evil. Update: Found it, https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_posting_for_three_years_and_just_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_postin...
- yreg 2y agoWhat's the advantage of heavenban compared to shadowban?
- adr1an 2y agoFrom the platform perspective, user is engaged meanwhile a shadowban is soon going to turn into a user that leaves.
- olalonde 2y agoReminded me the 32 year old "Linux is obsolete" thread on Usenet: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/wlhw16QWltI https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/wlhw16QWltI
- aklkrtp 2y agoA repentant sinner story that will justify all bans by association. Posted shortly after a real world ban yesterday! I guess the Code of Obedience hawks can point to a successful struggle session. Except that reasoning by analogy and association is flawed.
- drewcoo 2y agoSomething Awful "community."
- johnnyanmac 2y agoIt's in the name, but it had its warm points. SA more or less started the idea of "Let's plays" for games. Written walkthroughs that later transformed into youtube playthroughs that would spawn some of the first gaming content creators. I joined very late, though. Wonder how the older days were.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoRelated: mods in general have way too much power in communities like SA and Reddit. They apply bans mostly based on their personal biases. For example on Reddit all sorts of current topics from the Russia Ukraine war to trans to protests can get users banned in various subreddits, if you aren’t aligned to the echo chamber views of that subreddit. Worse, there are bots that will monitor comments or subscriptions and ban you for participating in some subreddits.
- jokoon 2y agoI am still bitter for getting banned from my EU country subreddit, for saying hamas dresses as civilians. This is a sign that if Reddit dies, it will probably be because of the mods. This is becoming so bad, that admins added rules that prohibits subreddits to have discussion about the moderation of another subreddit.
- antisthenes 2y agoReddit mods are not like the moderators of old, who usually had good judgment.
- davewritescode 2y agoThe Tesla subreddit collective proactively bans people who comment in any sub-Reddit they don’t like. I dropped a drive by comment on a subreddit that was Tesla related but apparently had the wrong opinion so I was banned from a number of other subreddits unless I deleted my post and apologized.
- johnnyanmac 2y agofor SA, no one's really stopping them. This is a site who's old owner banned furries because he didn't like furries. That's just the realities of Malicious Dictator for Life. Reddit is the core opposite. They have a few rules regarding legality mitigation and very much do care if the largest subreddits try to change the culture. But otherwise, they really do not care about the prattle of the intersub politics (you know, until they conspire and make things hard for admins). Reddit is first come, first served, mods are based on seniority (no matter how long they leave their sub), and the dismissal to any disagreement is "make your own subreddit". There are easy ways to mitigate this, but no financial incentive to do so unless they are breaking site rules (or extremely rare cases when a "head mod" tries to destroy a subreddit. like the r/wow fiasco from some 14 years ago) >Worse, there are bots that will monitor comments or subscriptions and ban you for participating in some subreddits. definitely one of the breaking points for me. I do not believe a mod's moderation should apply to what other activity you participate in outside of their subreddits. nor should a supermod ban you from 20 subs due to a disagreement in 1. But it hasn't hit that critical mass for reddit to care yet (i.e. a big enough mod hasn't gone rogue and threaten Reddit's money).
- swayvil 2y agoDemocratic election of moderators seems like an obvious good idea. But nobody does it. Why do you suppose that is? EDIT : I guess hn sorta does this. Garner enough upvotes and they give you various powers.
- Zambyte 2y agoThat seems like it would be nothing more than a popularity contest in most cases.
- swayvil 2y agoIf the forum members are smart then "by popularity" is a good way to pick a moderator.
- playingalong 2y agoAFAIK StackExchange / StackOverflow does this.
- slippy 2y agoThey were lucky the forum still *existed* or the ban logic was still in place after 10 years... So many sites like MySpace have gone defunct or others have changed their systems, etc, etc.
- _the_inflator 2y agoI know both sides, being admin or mod and being a normal user. I never got banned, however banned users. I realized that this very act can be devastating to one person while the rest (others involved, passive or active) simply moves on and in 99% of the time forgets about the issue. Moral of the story: whenever there is some sort of asymmetry of people involved, one faces harsh consequences while the other or others don’t, do the same. Forget about it, this grudge is totally one sided. Or build your own company out of spite. But never let a ban compromise your mental health.
- kybernetyk 2y ago>Your account is unable to post or reply until Jan 1, 3000 1:00 am. I guess I should set an alarm... (This is a ban I got on the official World of Warcraft forums roughly 10 years ago. Funny that they don't hand out permabans ;)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mylastattempt 2y agoThere's no link to the actual forum post in the pcgamer article, or am I missing it?
- cannontee 2y ago[dead]
- aspenmayer 2y agoTalk about necroposting. I actually find this aspect of BBS/newsgroup/forum culture to be very intersting, and norms around necroposting vary widely between sites. I've noticed that many modern sites automatically archive threads after inactivity or due to age, such as Reddit and HN. I wonder what the rationale for disabling comments on old posts on HN is? I can't imagine that is due to any technical limitation. I've often found old threads and replied to them when I'm able on platforms that allow it. When I find old threads on HN, I'm always a bit forlorn when that eventuality is forsworn. I suppose that's why reposts are allowed, but I can't reply in-thread to the same person I intend to when old threads are locked. It's just not the same. Anyone else into posting on old threads? What's the oldest thread you've revived? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum#Necroposting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum#Necroposting https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/necropost https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/necropost
- incomingpain 2y agoBeen there, I get it. My most recent reddit bans, I as a trans person was in a vaguely trans subreddit just trying to be postive and help out. Person was talking about obgyn stuff, they never mentioned their gender, i typed it as they were a lady. They flipped out i misgender them. Reddit banned me for promoting hate; I appealed. They replaced the ban with a warning. Meanwhile I'm trans and was just trying to help. I go back to the original conversation and OP gets even more angry that I'm not banned for being a transphobe. They call me CIS and I explain that I'm trans and not CIS, that CIS is a slur they shouldn't use. I get banned for promoting hate. I appeal, reddit overturns again. I went back for 1 more message and quit reddit. Censorious echo chamber with literally no value. Ironically reddit then goes ahead and invites me buy into their IPO because I have a million karma. Lol ridiculous.