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> sometimes people get hell banned that probably don't deserve it. Speaking about that... There are also accounts that have their comments show up just fine,

> sometimes people get hell banned that probably don't deserve it. Speaking about that... There are also accounts that have their comments show up just fine, but all their submits get "hell banned"... That is, you think your submit is shown on the new page, but it's really "[dead]" and you can't see that unless you have "show dead" turned on. If you have "show dead" on in your account, see my submits history for an example of this - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=powertower http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=powertower Right after I submitted an article that criticized Apple stock, all new ones became dead. Would love to know why 1) my account is like that and 2) what happens when I upvote someone elses submit (if my upvote hurts them, or even counts).

SeanDav 14y ago
Never heard about that type of hell banning before on HN. I must admit I am not a fan of people getting hell banned on 1 post or submission, unless the post truly is grossly over the top. I see a lot of hell banning as a result of a single post where I often wonder what exactly was so wrong about it. Moderation on HN is not transparent at all and very subjective, yet I still think the quality of the posts on HN beats every other site out there. Not sure if that is because of, or despite the moderation, hard to tell with such little transparency!
tokenadult 14y ago
There are also accounts that have their comments show up just fine, but all their submits get "hell banned"... That is, you think your submit is shown on the new page, but it's really "[dead]" and you can't see that unless you have "show dead" turned on. Are you sure that that kind of autokilling is by user, rather than by site submitted? There are quite a few story source sites that are autokilled on submission because experience has shown that those sites consistently produce blogspam, political rants, or other kinds of stories that violate the Hacker News guidelines. It may be that some users have preferences in what they submit that happen to coincide with sites that are on the Hacker News autokill-on-submission list. Or it may be, as you surmise, that some users have a partial hellban that allows them to comment but not to submit new stories. You asked us to look at your own submissions list http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=powertower http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=powertower for an example, and it may be that your submission history was evaluated (algorithmically?) as a submission history that makes it more likely than not that any of your newer submissions would be off-topic or otherwise contrary to the HN guidelines. Over the years, I've observed some users become very astute at submitting that which is well liked here, and they don't have any problems making new submissions. I'm glad I saw your comment, as this is an interesting meta-question. AFTER EDIT: It occurs to me, while we are in a thread engaged in meta-discussion of HN moderation, that I would like to know why one of the recent submissions I made http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tokenadult http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tokenadult is dead. If I remember correctly, the link was live as I submitted it (in other words, it wasn't autokilled), and yet a while later I looked for it, and saw that it was dead (as I too have showdead turned on in my user settings). I'm not sure why that happened. The last time I had a submission, from a source that I was sure was an acceptable source for HN, autokilled, I asked pg about it by email, and his response was that a text string in the URL tripped a spam detection algorithm. That submission was restored to life, but by then the submission had sunk out of view on the new page, so there was never any discussion of that submission here.
- brudgers 14y ago
  Your dead submission certainly isn't very good on its face. I might flag it if I saw it. And I have no difficulty believing that some people would always flag it. However, the answers are certainly worthy of consideration. http://edge.org/responses/q2013 http://edge.org/responses/q2013
- greenyoda 14y ago
  "Are you sure that that kind of autokilling is by user, rather than by site submitted?" If you look at his submission history, you can see that every single one of the 18 articles he submitted in the last 154 days is "dead". This includes articles from sites like cnet.com, wikipedia.org, serverfault.com, etc. from which many other articles have been successfully posted recently. This would suggest that the user is banned, not the specific content he posted.
brudgers 14y ago
Sampling the submissions which are dead, there are a few sites which I could see being on HN's blacklist. The blacklist appears to be fine grained enough to block particular authors. Compare your CNET submission on the Star Trek Fusion Engine to the story which made HN. http://txchnologist.com/post/32463368168/channeling-star-trek-researchers-to-begin-fusion http://txchnologist.com/post/32463368168/channeling-star-tre... I wouldn't be surprised if there was a combination of factors involved. Flagged submissions such as the "iPhone 5 is crap" linkbait. Dubious sites like vice.com. Political sites like america.com
- powertower 14y ago
  You might be right but... I've seen too many anti-Microsoft cnet submits hit the front-page for cnet to have anything but a positive weight on HN. Also duplicates and shorts and blog-spam hits front page all the time. And I don't see anything to indicate that Author having a negative weight here. As for all the other referenced submits, they were automatically dead-on-arrival. And I'd imagine whatever happened to my account, happened right-on, or right-before the last good submit. I do remember that my "H.265 is so slow that it's impossible to even test (multimedia.cx)" went to the front-page quickly, and while completely accurate, was flagged off quickly because some people in the comments decided that because it was 2 years old it was no longer valid, and clicked the flag button (which is quite effective at taking submits off front-page). In combination with that, I'll admit I had 1 or 2 front-page hitting submits disappear before too. And that could be the reason, but I can only guess, and not knowing why your penalized, or what you can do about it, really sucks. P.S., that's a really nice 'Star Trek' engine article, you should submit it. I'll upvote it.
  - brudgers 14y ago
    "that's a really nice 'Star Trek' engine article, you should submit it. I'll upvote it." A pointer to another possible reason that your submissions are killed.
pygy_ 14y ago
IIRC, you can also be selectively and silently prevented from flagging, if you abuse the feature.

SeanDav 14y ago

Never heard about that type of hell banning before on HN. I must admit I am not a fan of people getting hell banned on 1 post or submission, unless the post truly is grossly over the top. I see a lot of hell banning as a result of a single post where I often wonder what exactly was so wrong about it. Moderation on HN is not transparent at all and very subjective, yet I still think the quality of the posts on HN beats every other site out there. Not sure if that is because of, or despite the moderation, hard to tell with such little transparency!

tokenadult 14y ago

There are also accounts that have their comments show up just fine, but all their submits get "hell banned"... That is, you think your submit is shown on the new page, but it's really "[dead]" and you can't see that unless you have "show dead" turned on. Are you sure that that kind of autokilling is by user, rather than by site submitted? There are quite a few story source sites that are autokilled on submission because experience has shown that those sites consistently produce blogspam, political rants, or other kinds of stories that violate the Hacker News guidelines. It may be that some users have preferences in what they submit that happen to coincide with sites that are on the Hacker News autokill-on-submission list. Or it may be, as you surmise, that some users have a partial hellban that allows them to comment but not to submit new stories. You asked us to look at your own submissions list http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=powertower http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=powertower for an example, and it may be that your submission history was evaluated (algorithmically?) as a submission history that makes it more likely than not that any of your newer submissions would be off-topic or otherwise contrary to the HN guidelines. Over the years, I've observed some users become very astute at submitting that which is well liked here, and they don't have any problems making new submissions. I'm glad I saw your comment, as this is an interesting meta-question. AFTER EDIT: It occurs to me, while we are in a thread engaged in meta-discussion of HN moderation, that I would like to know why one of the recent submissions I made http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tokenadult http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tokenadult is dead. If I remember correctly, the link was live as I submitted it (in other words, it wasn't autokilled), and yet a while later I looked for it, and saw that it was dead (as I too have showdead turned on in my user settings). I'm not sure why that happened. The last time I had a submission, from a source that I was sure was an acceptable source for HN, autokilled, I asked pg about it by email, and his response was that a text string in the URL tripped a spam detection algorithm. That submission was restored to life, but by then the submission had sunk out of view on the new page, so there was never any discussion of that submission here.

brudgers 14y ago
Your dead submission certainly isn't very good on its face. I might flag it if I saw it. And I have no difficulty believing that some people would always flag it. However, the answers are certainly worthy of consideration. http://edge.org/responses/q2013 http://edge.org/responses/q2013
greenyoda 14y ago
"Are you sure that that kind of autokilling is by user, rather than by site submitted?" If you look at his submission history, you can see that every single one of the 18 articles he submitted in the last 154 days is "dead". This includes articles from sites like cnet.com, wikipedia.org, serverfault.com, etc. from which many other articles have been successfully posted recently. This would suggest that the user is banned, not the specific content he posted.

brudgers 14y ago

Sampling the submissions which are dead, there are a few sites which I could see being on HN's blacklist. The blacklist appears to be fine grained enough to block particular authors. Compare your CNET submission on the Star Trek Fusion Engine to the story which made HN. http://txchnologist.com/post/32463368168/channeling-star-trek-researchers-to-begin-fusion http://txchnologist.com/post/32463368168/channeling-star-tre... I wouldn't be surprised if there was a combination of factors involved. Flagged submissions such as the "iPhone 5 is crap" linkbait. Dubious sites like vice.com. Political sites like america.com

powertower 14y ago
You might be right but... I've seen too many anti-Microsoft cnet submits hit the front-page for cnet to have anything but a positive weight on HN. Also duplicates and shorts and blog-spam hits front page all the time. And I don't see anything to indicate that Author having a negative weight here. As for all the other referenced submits, they were automatically dead-on-arrival. And I'd imagine whatever happened to my account, happened right-on, or right-before the last good submit. I do remember that my "H.265 is so slow that it's impossible to even test (multimedia.cx)" went to the front-page quickly, and while completely accurate, was flagged off quickly because some people in the comments decided that because it was 2 years old it was no longer valid, and clicked the flag button (which is quite effective at taking submits off front-page). In combination with that, I'll admit I had 1 or 2 front-page hitting submits disappear before too. And that could be the reason, but I can only guess, and not knowing why your penalized, or what you can do about it, really sucks. P.S., that's a really nice 'Star Trek' engine article, you should submit it. I'll upvote it.
- brudgers 14y ago
  "that's a really nice 'Star Trek' engine article, you should submit it. I'll upvote it." A pointer to another possible reason that your submissions are killed.

pygy_ 14y ago

IIRC, you can also be selectively and silently prevented from flagging, if you abuse the feature.