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Enable the `showdead` option. He was hellbanned for voicing a dissenting opinion in a thread about sexism.

by pygy_ 14y ago

johnx123-up 14y ago
Sorry, but how? (Don't find any link)
- pygy_ 14y ago
  In your profile, between notifo and noprocrast. Maybe there's a karma threshold?
  - johnx123-up 14y ago
    Thanks, got it.
dmorgan 14y ago
Yes, because "free speech" is nice and all, but there are some opinions that you should not have, even on a liberal place like Hacker News. One should not be allowed to divert from popular opinion (be it popular in society in general, in some conservative circle, or merely popular within the hip crowd), even if he is not being trollish and is providing arguments about it. In issues where most HN people agree, you should not dissent, because we have already reached the absolute enlightenment and correct opinion on things such as "sexism". No need for discussion or argumentation any more on this front, except to agree with each other. I propose we call those "hell-banning" provoking arguments, "thought crimes". Which reminds me of the 3rd most popular article on HN today: "Free speech is dying in the Western world. While most people still enjoy considerable freedom of expression, this right, once a near-absolute, has become less defined and less dependable for those espousing controversial social, political or religious views. The decline of free speech has come not from any single blow but rather from thousands of paper cuts of well-intentioned exceptions designed to maintain social harmony."
- wisty 14y ago
  Hellbanning is necessary to keep the trolls out. The problem is, HN's hellbans are really clunky, especially given how pg practically invented spam filters. You'd think there'd be some kind of bayesian predictor on whether a poster is a troll, and modding them troll would simply increase the probability that their posts would be DOAd.
  - tripzilch 14y ago
    > Hellbanning is necessary to keep the trolls out. No it is NOT. You do understand what hellbanning is, right? It means hiding their posts from everyone but them. That's right, if you were hellbanned, you wouldn't know. Read this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-hellban.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h... Hellbanning, as opposed to regular banning, a warning system or suspensions, is counterproductive, a giant waste of people's time and frankly condescending towards the userbase. There is nothing that hellbanning (the way it's doled out on HN) solves better than regular bans, suspensions or warnings. And there are a whole lot of things it makes worse. To me the concept of hellbanning always seemed like a real nasty practical joke, something you'd specifically code as a one-off to temporarily trick your worst, most persistent long-time troll. As you use it as a punishment method on everyone, it becomes less effective on actual trolls (compared to regular bans), because a determined troll knows its environment, and knows to occasionally check their account via other means to see if it's been hellbanned. So for that troll, a hellban differs none from a regular ban. Regular users, however, since the mods are not infallible (instead, on HN they are for some ill-thought-out reason invisible and unaccountable), sometimes also get caught in this. Sometimes for little reasons, sometimes they did earn some punishment for ill intentions. However when these are not full-time trolls, it becomes really sad to see how it wastes a lot of smart people's time. They can't see they're hellbanned, I've seen some of the poor sods keep on writing comments (that people who did not switch on "show dead" cannot see) for over a year. Some of those comments are really thoughtful, as well. When I see such a case, I browse back in their comment history to see what infraction caused their hellban. Often I have to guess, what is their most downvoted comment from just before the time their comments turn grey. As I said, unaccountable. Yes it's usually something very stupid, something that deserves all the downvotes it can get, perhaps some of it might warrant a regular ban, but I have NEVER seen ANY hellbanned user saying something so utterly reprehensible that it would warrant wasting someone's time for over a year that they spent writing comments on HN. The other problem is, it doesn't even notify them that they did something wrong! It's not even a slap on the wrist, they don't notice! It's just stupid. And in the mean time, a determined troll occasionally checks if they can still see their account's comments via a proxy, and if they cannot, they simply register a new account, just as if they were banned via a regular ban.
ekianjo 14y ago
Who decides ultimately who is hellbanned or not ?
- davidw 14y ago
  Paul Graham. Isn't it common knowledge that this is his site? I mean, I suppose that legally, it's Y Combinator's, but PG wrote it and has always run it.
  - wahnfrieden 14y ago
    He has other mods too.
    - davidw 14y ago
      Yes, but the question included 'ultimately', which would refer to PG in this case.
  - ekianjo 14y ago
    I doubt he has the time to read every flagged message. That's why I was asking about what is the hellbanning process, if several people are involved.
    - chc 14y ago
      You can be hellbanned manually by a moderator (PG is the only moderator whose name is publicly known AFAIK, but there are others) or automatically by the system for going severely negative in karma.

Enable the `showdead` option. He was hellbanned for voicing a dissenting opinion in a thread about sexism.

by pygy_ 14y ago

Enable the `showdead` option. He was hellbanned for voicing a dissenting opinion in a thread about sexism.

johnx123-up 14y ago

Sorry, but how? (Don't find any link)

pygy_ 14y ago
In your profile, between notifo and noprocrast. Maybe there's a karma threshold?
- johnx123-up 14y ago
  Thanks, got it.

dmorgan 14y ago

Yes, because "free speech" is nice and all, but there are some opinions that you should not have, even on a liberal place like Hacker News. One should not be allowed to divert from popular opinion (be it popular in society in general, in some conservative circle, or merely popular within the hip crowd), even if he is not being trollish and is providing arguments about it. In issues where most HN people agree, you should not dissent, because we have already reached the absolute enlightenment and correct opinion on things such as "sexism". No need for discussion or argumentation any more on this front, except to agree with each other. I propose we call those "hell-banning" provoking arguments, "thought crimes". Which reminds me of the 3rd most popular article on HN today: "Free speech is dying in the Western world. While most people still enjoy considerable freedom of expression, this right, once a near-absolute, has become less defined and less dependable for those espousing controversial social, political or religious views. The decline of free speech has come not from any single blow but rather from thousands of paper cuts of well-intentioned exceptions designed to maintain social harmony."

wisty 14y ago
Hellbanning is necessary to keep the trolls out. The problem is, HN's hellbans are really clunky, especially given how pg practically invented spam filters. You'd think there'd be some kind of bayesian predictor on whether a poster is a troll, and modding them troll would simply increase the probability that their posts would be DOAd.
- tripzilch 14y ago
  > Hellbanning is necessary to keep the trolls out. No it is NOT. You do understand what hellbanning is, right? It means hiding their posts from everyone but them. That's right, if you were hellbanned, you wouldn't know. Read this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-hellban.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h... Hellbanning, as opposed to regular banning, a warning system or suspensions, is counterproductive, a giant waste of people's time and frankly condescending towards the userbase. There is nothing that hellbanning (the way it's doled out on HN) solves better than regular bans, suspensions or warnings. And there are a whole lot of things it makes worse. To me the concept of hellbanning always seemed like a real nasty practical joke, something you'd specifically code as a one-off to temporarily trick your worst, most persistent long-time troll. As you use it as a punishment method on everyone, it becomes less effective on actual trolls (compared to regular bans), because a determined troll knows its environment, and knows to occasionally check their account via other means to see if it's been hellbanned. So for that troll, a hellban differs none from a regular ban. Regular users, however, since the mods are not infallible (instead, on HN they are for some ill-thought-out reason invisible and unaccountable), sometimes also get caught in this. Sometimes for little reasons, sometimes they did earn some punishment for ill intentions. However when these are not full-time trolls, it becomes really sad to see how it wastes a lot of smart people's time. They can't see they're hellbanned, I've seen some of the poor sods keep on writing comments (that people who did not switch on "show dead" cannot see) for over a year. Some of those comments are really thoughtful, as well. When I see such a case, I browse back in their comment history to see what infraction caused their hellban. Often I have to guess, what is their most downvoted comment from just before the time their comments turn grey. As I said, unaccountable. Yes it's usually something very stupid, something that deserves all the downvotes it can get, perhaps some of it might warrant a regular ban, but I have NEVER seen ANY hellbanned user saying something so utterly reprehensible that it would warrant wasting someone's time for over a year that they spent writing comments on HN. The other problem is, it doesn't even notify them that they did something wrong! It's not even a slap on the wrist, they don't notice! It's just stupid. And in the mean time, a determined troll occasionally checks if they can still see their account's comments via a proxy, and if they cannot, they simply register a new account, just as if they were banned via a regular ban.

ekianjo 14y ago

Who decides ultimately who is hellbanned or not ?

davidw 14y ago
Paul Graham. Isn't it common knowledge that this is his site? I mean, I suppose that legally, it's Y Combinator's, but PG wrote it and has always run it.
- wahnfrieden 14y ago
  He has other mods too.
  - davidw 14y ago
    Yes, but the question included 'ultimately', which would refer to PG in this case.
- ekianjo 14y ago
  I doubt he has the time to read every flagged message. That's why I was asking about what is the hellbanning process, if several people are involved.
  - chc 14y ago
    You can be hellbanned manually by a moderator (PG is the only moderator whose name is publicly known AFAIK, but there are others) or automatically by the system for going severely negative in karma.