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Any discussion of the hellban procedure seems a quick way to be hellbanned. It's a horrible, unjust, arbitrary system and is generally abused by anonymous, see

by aneth4 14y ago

Any discussion of the hellban procedure seems a quick way to be hellbanned. It's a horrible, unjust, arbitrary system and is generally abused by anonymous, seemingly petty moderators. My main account was hellbanned (also slowbanned, and my IP address banned) for apparently replying to the wrong mystery moderator with something he/she didn't like. Hellbanning on HN is sorely in need of oversight and reconsideration. Hellbanning should be used only for obvious trolls. There are other ways to punish and train bad behavior from legitimate contributors.

tripzilch 14y ago
> Any discussion of the hellban procedure seems a quick way to be hellbanned. I haven't noticed this? I posted a few critiques on hellbanning over the past few weeks and since most of them got some upvotes, I assume I did not incur any mod wrath ;) I was gonna say, maybe I've gathered sufficient points to get away with more, but then I took a look at larrys user profile page (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=larrys https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=larrys) and he has accumulated nearly thrice my score. That's good. There's already sufficient naturally occurring social pressure that lets older accounts get away with more, no need to inflate the effect based on karma. In larrys' case, I can't see anything that's remotely offensive in his last few comments, so I'm going to assume good faith and guess that the actual offending comment probably got removed entirely. It's a shame we have to guess about these things though. Wouldn't it be trivial for moderators to leave a note about their reasons? Very short and to-the-point, like a Wikipedia edit-summary. It wouldn't even require extra code to start with, they can just edit it into the relevant post. I've seen very large blog-type forums work that way. It merely requires moderators to decide and agree to do it that way. > There are other ways to punish and train bad behavior from legitimate contributors. Yes. Problem is that while it does punish (in some sense), in no sense does it "train" the affected users, because there's no telling when/if they will notice the punishment, it could be many months, and even if by then the user takes the trouble to figure out what post caused this sanction, the complete lack in immediacy of consequence entirely negates any effectiveness in behavioural change (see: Operant Conditioning, there's a lot of research that is directly applicable to online community moderation).

by aneth4 14y ago

tripzilch 14y ago

> Any discussion of the hellban procedure seems a quick way to be hellbanned. I haven't noticed this? I posted a few critiques on hellbanning over the past few weeks and since most of them got some upvotes, I assume I did not incur any mod wrath ;) I was gonna say, maybe I've gathered sufficient points to get away with more, but then I took a look at larrys user profile page (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=larrys https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=larrys) and he has accumulated nearly thrice my score. That's good. There's already sufficient naturally occurring social pressure that lets older accounts get away with more, no need to inflate the effect based on karma. In larrys' case, I can't see anything that's remotely offensive in his last few comments, so I'm going to assume good faith and guess that the actual offending comment probably got removed entirely. It's a shame we have to guess about these things though. Wouldn't it be trivial for moderators to leave a note about their reasons? Very short and to-the-point, like a Wikipedia edit-summary. It wouldn't even require extra code to start with, they can just edit it into the relevant post. I've seen very large blog-type forums work that way. It merely requires moderators to decide and agree to do it that way. > There are other ways to punish and train bad behavior from legitimate contributors. Yes. Problem is that while it does punish (in some sense), in no sense does it "train" the affected users, because there's no telling when/if they will notice the punishment, it could be many months, and even if by then the user takes the trouble to figure out what post caused this sanction, the complete lack in immediacy of consequence entirely negates any effectiveness in behavioural change (see: Operant Conditioning, there's a lot of research that is directly applicable to online community moderation).