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Poll: How do you feel about the number of hellbans?
Over the past 6 months or so it has felt like more accounts are getting hellbanned. I know a there is at least a vocal minority who feel that this has gotten excessive
( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4827922 ). I'm looking for a rough sense of how popular this view is.
Overall:
- Benferhat 14y agoI'm still wondering why you haven't been hellbanned yet.
- z_ 14y agoWhat is a hellban?
- kgermino 14y agoBasically a users comments and submissions are automatically killed (you can see them by turning on 'showdead' in your profile) to everyone but the user. It's a very useful technique for fighting spam and trolls because it hides their activity from the rest of the site, yet they don't know that there is a problem so they don't work around it or create a new account. The HN mods like to use hellbans on trolls, however it can sometimes be hard to distinguish a troll from a misguided or obnoxious user. Also, sometimes an otherwise good user will have a thread where they come off as trolling for one reason or another. In these cases it can be hard to know whether a user should be banned or not.
- brudgers 14y agoI am not of the mindset that HN should be a democracy. If it serves the explicit and implicit goals of HN, I don't find issue with hellbanning.
- kgermino 14y agoI tend to agree, usually when I see these polls I think of them as feeling out the community's opinion rather then 'let's take a vote and pressure pg to follow the result' Especially since I think pg doesn't particularly care about most people's opinion on this (nor should he)
- brudgers 14y agoI don't think meta discussion of HN mechanics is typically productive or helpful, because the mechanics are not controllable by those discussing it, e.g. displaying comment scores.
- kgermino 14y agoThat's fair. I guess my counter argument would be that it's a problem when meta on a different thread, or when there are more than 1 or 2 meta threads a week. Otherwise they are easy to avoid and infrequent enough that meta threads don't crowd out more legitimate ones.