6 ms·

Hellbanned from Hacker News

187 points by yankcrime 14y ago

joering2 14y ago
you gotta be kidding me! Just this morning I started writing an article about my experience being hellbanned. I will still post it at some point, but seriously I mentioned that yesterday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102431 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102431 edit: (since I cannot add new comment): also, you cannot upvote this post since its dead (I just learnt that and decided to share) edit: as of 4:35 est, article is not dead anymore. 5 min ago it still was dead... edit: 4:43 dead again. edit: now its back from dead again. but you can't upvote it (arrow dissapears, score remains the same).
guard-of-terra 14y ago
My old account was banned too, in orwellian style: ilyak does not exist; ilyak never existed. Some of my comments were surely flamebait but so am I; at least they were honest. But I still do not know the exact reason, obviously.
gfosco 14y ago
Wow... A top 50 user treated like a troll. Way to go, HN.
- 7rurl 14y ago
  Who are you talking about? The linked site is down, so I can't even tell who this is about. Assuming the user's name is the same as the domain name (jcs), then that user hasn't posted much of anything as far as I can tell... certainly not enough to be considered a top 50 user. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jcs http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jcs
  - pkamb 14y ago
    https://twitter.com/jcs/status/212990331216596993 https://twitter.com/jcs/status/212990331216596993
  - yankcrime 14y ago
    Nope, this is (was?) his profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=there https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=there
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- colkassad 14y ago
  Looks like his site just got hellbanned by HN too. Perhaps someone can get by all of this outrageous censorship and tell us what is going on.
ghurlman 14y ago
Hellbanned from the internet as well, apparently; notsomuch as a google cache available.
_mayo 14y ago
looks like it's down.
wmf 14y ago
Basically you can't use HN to discuss itself. Although I'm not a believer in the "wisdom of crowds", I think many-to-many discussions about HN could be more productive than many-to-pg private emails. Maybe there are some lessons to be learned from MetaTalk here.
ck2 14y ago
Tell me about it. My old "_ck_" account was killed and I still have no idea why.
pbhjpbhj 14y ago
Got to say that this all looks pretty bad for the mods. -- Edit: http://www.reddit.com/r/NewsForHackers/comments/v0f8u/overmoderating_on_hackernews/ http://www.reddit.com/r/NewsForHackers/comments/v0f8u/overmo... is this worth discussing outside?
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  Violent moderation leads to people being annoyed, some questions, more moderation; a minor outrage, bans;amajor outrage spilling to social media, nuclear wipes. Damaged community, sometimes even dead community. If you see a flamebait post, you delete it. But if you see a question about where the original post go, and you delete it: then you just started a toxic flame war with your own hands. And "guidelines" never help. When people are outraged they would not observe same rules they supported a day before. Sorry, not going to happen, so don't blame flame war on public.
veb 14y ago
Those guidelines are silly, life always finds a way... to bypass guidelines.
ohgodthecat 14y ago
Mirror: https://gist.github.com/2926119 https://gist.github.com/2926119
Cherian_Abraham 14y ago
I can relate. I posted a story about Apple's disruption at the POS talking of how the new retail App allows for purchases in store without ever having to contract a store rep. I posted that alongside why I believe this is important considering the missed opportunity that was GoogleWallet. The post got front page before getting sunk by mods. I dont know why, but there was nothing sensationalistic about the title or the content. And this is a space that I have considerable capabilities in. And I was not trolling. Since then none of the stories I post under this handle ever see the light of day. They cannot be voted up and they just face a slow death. I stopped spending any time posting on other threads since then because I cannot see the value in contributing to stories if my stories are not allowed to play fairly.
- cremnob 14y ago
  The alternative is becoming like reddit so I personally like the heavy moderation, warts and all.
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    False equivalence. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
daenz 14y ago
Whenever you give some people more power than others, in any form, abuses of that power will eventually happen. Police, prison guards, bosses, government officials, parents, website moderators, etc, etc, etc. The system becomes dysfunctional. Power just amplifies people's egos, personal insecurities, and prejudices. We can't deal with it.
antidaily 14y ago
Smell ya later.
comex 14y ago
I consider hellbanning a rude and deceitful tactic that should only be used against users who immaturely refuse to accept a regular ban. Having hellbans as the only type of ban is rather odd.
- Confusion 14y ago
  It's hard to detect whether someone refuses a regular ban. People use proxies. It's more trouble than it's worth. A account hellban is the simplest ban that works.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
gyardley 14y ago
Hellbanned for violating a site guideline, huh? Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. If neglecting to observe proprieties is a characteristic of the most successful founders, surely we can shrug off a minor violation of the site's rules that led to what many thought was an interesting discussion.
billswift 14y ago
PG posted an excuse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103210), then the thread he posted it on was killed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102907
pxlpshr 14y ago
Moderators may make mistakes here and there; they are human so just deal with it. It's what makes this place great. The hand of god's helpers has always been here, most of the time you don't know it. Can you imagine how snarky this place would be without it? I don't think (reddit * intellectuals * anonymous) would sustain for very long.
gamache 14y ago
During my hellban about two years ago (I posted an article which had been silently banned, and was flagged for spam, I guess?), I was anonymously advised that the HN moderators were "capricious and tone-deaf", and that my recourse was to contact PG directly. After a curt and unpleasant email exchange, I was back on my feet. Pretty stupid that I had to bother PG at all, and even stupider that my one interaction with him was so needlessly distasteful.
- joering2 14y ago
  confirmed and +1. During my ban emailing info@ did not help. Emailing PG did.
- muyuu 14y ago
  Not this time I guess, it was pg personally who hellbanned him. I hope he listens and drops it. I think it's massively disrespectful to users to hellban and delete from view strongly upvoted posts, or to silently mass-downvote them. Pg and mods, respect your users' opinions a bit more than that, please...
  - gamache 14y ago
    PG has the right to curate HN posts as he sees fit. I just think a little more transparency would go a long way. Hellbanning is, by design, sneaky. The fact that it's the predominant ban method is extremely frustrating for a non-malicious user.
tptacek 14y ago
Nine times out of ten, the cabal makes good calls about hellbanning people, and the bans improve the site. But when they get it wrong, boy, do they ever get it wrong. For instance, Paul Graham personally hellbanned Maciej Ceglowski for calling Sebastian Marshall a "prolix douchebag". Maciej's comment was not a high point of Hacker News decorum and in that instance probably degraded the site slightly, but no reasonable person could have looked at 'idlewords comment record and not come to the conclusion that Maciej is someone we want on the site. Sometimes, you take the bad with the good. There have also been times where it's apparent that there is, if not "automatic", than at least "mechanical" banning for reasons other than nasty comments. I don't know or care what the abuse mechanisms being tripped are --- I buy into the idea that in this case, obscurity is making some baseline level of security cost-effective for Graham and his team. But it's important to know that whatever mechanical process is banning people for abuse, it's imperfect. Ultimately, I think Graham is in a bind here. A more typical forum site would enlist more community support to help police the site. Graham can't do that, because HN also runs important parts of YC's (very sensitive) applications and communications process.† I have a hard time holding this against him. Managing a sprawling forum site is a hard problem. Doing that while having the site do double-duty as the front-end for your startup seed fund system must be a nightmare. So I'd generally say: assume good faith; don't make a production of the mistakes; but, know that the mistakes do happen, are pretty annoying, and are worth at least remarking about. † (It's worth knowing that YC members also have some silent perks on HN, beyond the job ads). e45f8d80989cd423c9bfa66738395f8d71c89d8f
- pg 14y ago
  For instance, Paul Graham personally hellbanned Maciej Ceglowski for calling Sebastian Marshall a "prolix douchebag". No I didn't. If I had, his comments after that would be dead. Edit: tptacek points out that he was briefly banned, though not long enough to cause any of his comments to be killed.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Thanks for correcting that. He did have comments killed; that's how we noticed he was hellbanned. And, like many reasonable people would do, once he found out he'd been hellbanned, he left the site, which is my point: his leaving was more our loss than his. Mistakes happen. I'm just pointing this out as evidence that this particular form of site policing is error prone. I'm definitely not inclined to rant about the unfairness of it all, because I do not believe I could do a better job running a site like this.
jlgreco 14y ago
Anyone else notice that this post was dead for a few minutes, just a few minutes ago? Seems it is back now... Ok, and now it's dead again. Looks like it only came back for a few minutes and in those few minutes PG posted...
ddfall 14y ago
Is it just me or did this get post just get banned for a few minutes and then return?! Admins can't make up their minds now? Regardless, glad to see it back. Update: Yup, had the dead one in another tab still and now it's back. For now... Update 2: It's now dead again. It looks like it only came back for about five minutes. Update 3: And it's back again. Really wish I had put times on my updates now. Oh well. I wonder how long it will take until it gets pulled yet again.
pg 14y ago
I only banned him while I was waiting for a reply to the email I sent him. In fact I thought I'd already unbanned him, though I noticed just now that he was still banned. What a tempest in a teapot. Incidentally, this post and its predecessors illustrate perfectly why the site guidelines ask users to contact us about problems with moderation rather than posting on the site about them. Though nearly empty of content, they get upvoted faster than anything else.
- horsehead 14y ago
  I would assume they are typically upvoted for a reason. Obviously you have access to data I'm not privvy to, but 400+ upvotes in that little time would, I imagine, represent a significant portion of people who read the post. Obviously the site is no democracy, and I think we all understand that. But I would also guess that user feedback is appreciated (hence the request to send feedback via email). I would also think that many users have the same questions, but do not bother with an email because it is not really worth the hassle, and upvote a thread like that just to voice their agreement [else they would not upvote, unless they were simply trying to troll]. The whole scenario is fairly minor, but it seems to raise at least a small concern among what I would guess is a respectable portion of the userbase. edit: grammar.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
kmfrk 14y ago
I've had plenty of time where I was hell-banned through IP ban or something to that effect, never knowing what the hell the reason was. Often, I could just browse it with Tor, but obviously few, if any, sites are worth doing that. Is this some kind of weird flood control or a opaque and stupid moderation policy I am not aware of? I am not the kind of person to call people names, and I have often received the supposed bans after I have written some of my most popular posts or threads.

187 points by yankcrime 14y ago

you gotta be kidding me! Just this morning I started writing an article about my experience being hellbanned. I will still post it at some point, but seriously I mentioned that yesterday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102431 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102431 edit: (since I cannot add new comment): also, you cannot upvote this post since its dead (I just learnt that and decided to share) edit: as of 4:35 est, article is not dead anymore. 5 min ago it still was dead... edit: 4:43 dead again. edit: now its back from dead again. but you can't upvote it (arrow dissapears, score remains the same).

guard-of-terra 14y ago

My old account was banned too, in orwellian style: ilyak does not exist; ilyak never existed. Some of my comments were surely flamebait but so am I; at least they were honest. But I still do not know the exact reason, obviously.

gfosco 14y ago

Wow... A top 50 user treated like a troll. Way to go, HN.

7rurl 14y ago
Who are you talking about? The linked site is down, so I can't even tell who this is about. Assuming the user's name is the same as the domain name (jcs), then that user hasn't posted much of anything as far as I can tell... certainly not enough to be considered a top 50 user. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jcs http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jcs
- pkamb 14y ago
  https://twitter.com/jcs/status/212990331216596993 https://twitter.com/jcs/status/212990331216596993
- yankcrime 14y ago
  Nope, this is (was?) his profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=there https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=there
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
colkassad 14y ago
Looks like his site just got hellbanned by HN too. Perhaps someone can get by all of this outrageous censorship and tell us what is going on.

ghurlman 14y ago

Hellbanned from the internet as well, apparently; notsomuch as a google cache available.

_mayo 14y ago

looks like it's down.

wmf 14y ago

Basically you can't use HN to discuss itself. Although I'm not a believer in the "wisdom of crowds", I think many-to-many discussions about HN could be more productive than many-to-pg private emails. Maybe there are some lessons to be learned from MetaTalk here.

ck2 14y ago

Tell me about it. My old "_ck_" account was killed and I still have no idea why.

pbhjpbhj 14y ago

Got to say that this all looks pretty bad for the mods. -- Edit: http://www.reddit.com/r/NewsForHackers/comments/v0f8u/overmoderating_on_hackernews/ http://www.reddit.com/r/NewsForHackers/comments/v0f8u/overmo... is this worth discussing outside?

guard-of-terra 14y ago
Violent moderation leads to people being annoyed, some questions, more moderation; a minor outrage, bans;amajor outrage spilling to social media, nuclear wipes. Damaged community, sometimes even dead community. If you see a flamebait post, you delete it. But if you see a question about where the original post go, and you delete it: then you just started a toxic flame war with your own hands. And "guidelines" never help. When people are outraged they would not observe same rules they supported a day before. Sorry, not going to happen, so don't blame flame war on public.

veb 14y ago

Those guidelines are silly, life always finds a way... to bypass guidelines.

ohgodthecat 14y ago

Mirror: https://gist.github.com/2926119 https://gist.github.com/2926119

Cherian_Abraham 14y ago

I can relate. I posted a story about Apple's disruption at the POS talking of how the new retail App allows for purchases in store without ever having to contract a store rep. I posted that alongside why I believe this is important considering the missed opportunity that was GoogleWallet. The post got front page before getting sunk by mods. I dont know why, but there was nothing sensationalistic about the title or the content. And this is a space that I have considerable capabilities in. And I was not trolling. Since then none of the stories I post under this handle ever see the light of day. They cannot be voted up and they just face a slow death. I stopped spending any time posting on other threads since then because I cannot see the value in contributing to stories if my stories are not allowed to play fairly.

cremnob 14y ago
The alternative is becoming like reddit so I personally like the heavy moderation, warts and all.
- kmfrk 14y ago
  False equivalence. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

daenz 14y ago

Whenever you give some people more power than others, in any form, abuses of that power will eventually happen. Police, prison guards, bosses, government officials, parents, website moderators, etc, etc, etc. The system becomes dysfunctional. Power just amplifies people's egos, personal insecurities, and prejudices. We can't deal with it.

antidaily 14y ago

Smell ya later.

comex 14y ago

I consider hellbanning a rude and deceitful tactic that should only be used against users who immaturely refuse to accept a regular ban. Having hellbans as the only type of ban is rather odd.

Confusion 14y ago
It's hard to detect whether someone refuses a regular ban. People use proxies. It's more trouble than it's worth. A account hellban is the simplest ban that works.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

gyardley 14y ago

Hellbanned for violating a site guideline, huh? Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. If neglecting to observe proprieties is a characteristic of the most successful founders, surely we can shrug off a minor violation of the site's rules that led to what many thought was an interesting discussion.

billswift 14y ago

PG posted an excuse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103210), then the thread he posted it on was killed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102907

pxlpshr 14y ago

Moderators may make mistakes here and there; they are human so just deal with it. It's what makes this place great. The hand of god's helpers has always been here, most of the time you don't know it. Can you imagine how snarky this place would be without it? I don't think (reddit * intellectuals * anonymous) would sustain for very long.

gamache 14y ago

During my hellban about two years ago (I posted an article which had been silently banned, and was flagged for spam, I guess?), I was anonymously advised that the HN moderators were "capricious and tone-deaf", and that my recourse was to contact PG directly. After a curt and unpleasant email exchange, I was back on my feet. Pretty stupid that I had to bother PG at all, and even stupider that my one interaction with him was so needlessly distasteful.

joering2 14y ago
confirmed and +1. During my ban emailing info@ did not help. Emailing PG did.
muyuu 14y ago
Not this time I guess, it was pg personally who hellbanned him. I hope he listens and drops it. I think it's massively disrespectful to users to hellban and delete from view strongly upvoted posts, or to silently mass-downvote them. Pg and mods, respect your users' opinions a bit more than that, please...
- gamache 14y ago
  PG has the right to curate HN posts as he sees fit. I just think a little more transparency would go a long way. Hellbanning is, by design, sneaky. The fact that it's the predominant ban method is extremely frustrating for a non-malicious user.

tptacek 14y ago

Nine times out of ten, the cabal makes good calls about hellbanning people, and the bans improve the site. But when they get it wrong, boy, do they ever get it wrong. For instance, Paul Graham personally hellbanned Maciej Ceglowski for calling Sebastian Marshall a "prolix douchebag". Maciej's comment was not a high point of Hacker News decorum and in that instance probably degraded the site slightly, but no reasonable person could have looked at 'idlewords comment record and not come to the conclusion that Maciej is someone we want on the site. Sometimes, you take the bad with the good. There have also been times where it's apparent that there is, if not "automatic", than at least "mechanical" banning for reasons other than nasty comments. I don't know or care what the abuse mechanisms being tripped are --- I buy into the idea that in this case, obscurity is making some baseline level of security cost-effective for Graham and his team. But it's important to know that whatever mechanical process is banning people for abuse, it's imperfect. Ultimately, I think Graham is in a bind here. A more typical forum site would enlist more community support to help police the site. Graham can't do that, because HN also runs important parts of YC's (very sensitive) applications and communications process.† I have a hard time holding this against him. Managing a sprawling forum site is a hard problem. Doing that while having the site do double-duty as the front-end for your startup seed fund system must be a nightmare. So I'd generally say: assume good faith; don't make a production of the mistakes; but, know that the mistakes do happen, are pretty annoying, and are worth at least remarking about. † (It's worth knowing that YC members also have some silent perks on HN, beyond the job ads). e45f8d80989cd423c9bfa66738395f8d71c89d8f

pg 14y ago
For instance, Paul Graham personally hellbanned Maciej Ceglowski for calling Sebastian Marshall a "prolix douchebag". No I didn't. If I had, his comments after that would be dead. Edit: tptacek points out that he was briefly banned, though not long enough to cause any of his comments to be killed.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Thanks for correcting that. He did have comments killed; that's how we noticed he was hellbanned. And, like many reasonable people would do, once he found out he'd been hellbanned, he left the site, which is my point: his leaving was more our loss than his. Mistakes happen. I'm just pointing this out as evidence that this particular form of site policing is error prone. I'm definitely not inclined to rant about the unfairness of it all, because I do not believe I could do a better job running a site like this.

jlgreco 14y ago

Anyone else notice that this post was dead for a few minutes, just a few minutes ago? Seems it is back now... Ok, and now it's dead again. Looks like it only came back for a few minutes and in those few minutes PG posted...

ddfall 14y ago

Is it just me or did this get post just get banned for a few minutes and then return?! Admins can't make up their minds now? Regardless, glad to see it back. Update: Yup, had the dead one in another tab still and now it's back. For now... Update 2: It's now dead again. It looks like it only came back for about five minutes. Update 3: And it's back again. Really wish I had put times on my updates now. Oh well. I wonder how long it will take until it gets pulled yet again.

pg 14y ago

I only banned him while I was waiting for a reply to the email I sent him. In fact I thought I'd already unbanned him, though I noticed just now that he was still banned. What a tempest in a teapot. Incidentally, this post and its predecessors illustrate perfectly why the site guidelines ask users to contact us about problems with moderation rather than posting on the site about them. Though nearly empty of content, they get upvoted faster than anything else.

horsehead 14y ago
I would assume they are typically upvoted for a reason. Obviously you have access to data I'm not privvy to, but 400+ upvotes in that little time would, I imagine, represent a significant portion of people who read the post. Obviously the site is no democracy, and I think we all understand that. But I would also guess that user feedback is appreciated (hence the request to send feedback via email). I would also think that many users have the same questions, but do not bother with an email because it is not really worth the hassle, and upvote a thread like that just to voice their agreement [else they would not upvote, unless they were simply trying to troll]. The whole scenario is fairly minor, but it seems to raise at least a small concern among what I would guess is a respectable portion of the userbase. edit: grammar.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

kmfrk 14y ago

I've had plenty of time where I was hell-banned through IP ban or something to that effect, never knowing what the hell the reason was. Often, I could just browse it with Tor, but obviously few, if any, sites are worth doing that. Is this some kind of weird flood control or a opaque and stupid moderation policy I am not aware of? I am not the kind of person to call people names, and I have often received the supposed bans after I have written some of my most popular posts or threads.