10 ms·
Ask PG: Why is everybody hellbanned?
If you look at the "New" page with showdead set positive, you'll see that almost every post is dead, including some self posts made by high-karma users. Is this a bug or is there any specific reason this is happening?
EDIT: The problem appears to be fixed (though not retroactively).
- northwest 13y agoAs a general request, I would welcome more transparency (about how things are handled and what we can and cannot expect from HN). EDIT: I also believe that a lack of it will ultimately lead to HN being replaced by something else.
- alan_cx 13y agoThe whole business of banning from sites in general bothers me. More so with huge sites like FB and Twitter. These sites like to promote themselves as communities, and to be banned from a community with no explanation, due process or right to appeal is awful. It can literally alter, even ruin lives. This, AFAIK, doesn't happen in the "real" world". I don't see why virtual communities get some sort of impunity. Personally I think there should be an independent arbitration service which sites should sign up to. IMHO, that would protect both sides. Too often one is at the whim of an individual moderator or admin, rather than a rational considered process. Equally, banned people go off an tell every one they can they got badly treated. Fair arbitration would open it up. I had one instance. Something want working. I posted in the forum to get help. They blamed my ISP. I contacted the ISP, they blamed the site. I tried to get the two to talk. I got banned. A year later I tried to get re-instated. The person I emailed replied and told me that I wouldn't be, but wouldn't explain why I was initially banned or why I would remain banned. I had now where to go but to simply accept this. Very, very frustrating. Sorry to say this, and its NOT a reflection of HN or its moderation, but too often I worry that really we are dealing with people who get off on their little domain of power.
- anonymfus 13y agoDictator never give up the power. Only sites which already have good moderation would sign up to such service.
- eshvk 13y ago> These sites like to promote themselves as communities, and to be banned from a community with no explanation, due process or right to appeal is awful. It can literally alter, even ruin lives. This, AFAIK, doesn't happen in the "real" world". I don't see why virtual communities get some sort of impunity. Sure it happens in the real world. A real world community like an HOA. It is a private property. A private property can really make any sort of rules (apart from a few choice rules that don't flag banning by the super community: the government) and roll with it. I think an independent open source community would do better. You sign up for it, make whatever damn fool rule you want for your own tribe. Roll with it.
- alan_cx 13y agoCould you never resolve a HOA issue in a court, independently?
- eshvk 13y agoI don't have a house; however my brief experience from what I have seen is that the HOA is overwhelmingly favored. Unlike an Internet forum, not reading the TOS doesn't actually work as an excuse. Even for tearjerker issues involving veterans and flags.
- bluehex 13y agoThe only pattern I've noticed is that many of the hellbanned users only ever link to only a single domain -- probably their own.
- darxius 13y agoThis is also something I never understood. Who cares if I submit tons of (non-duplicate) links from my own domain. If the community doesn't like them, they won't get upvoted and will disappear. Same goes for the opposite.
- bluehex 13y agoI totally agree . I've found some things I would have liked to upvote in such banned users submissions a quite a few times.
- sigkill 13y agoHoly cow! Just saw it. It looks like a minefield. I speculate it's probably a bug or something because I've never seen so many dead links together. Either that, or today being a Sunday, has got everyone trying to promote their stuff.
- nhebb 13y agoIt's gotta be a bug. Either that, or pg cracked under the strain of running the YC empire and implicitly announced, "You're all dead to me."
- eksith 13y agoI'm considered "new" though I've lurked for a while before registering. There are some obvious cases (spamming, trolling, link-bait, off-topic, URL-shortening etc...) that leave little doubt to the reason, but it seems to be fairly well known that in fact no one really knows why some users get hellbanned while others, behaving far more egregiously (precluding above reasons), don't. I found this search enlightening though: https://www.google.com/search?q=hellbanned+hacker+news https://www.google.com/search?q=hellbanned+hacker+news
- kmfrk 13y agoThere's also a feature that slows down the site for a user under certain conditions. It's surreptitious crap like this that makes HN such a pain to use for a lot of us.
- ColinWright 13y agoFor how long have you run a popular discussion web site, and what measures do you take to reduce the increased snarkiness in extended exchanges? I'd love to hear how you solve the problem.
- petsos 13y agoHow long is the limit after which you are allowed to express a criticism?
- ColinWright 13y agoI don't understand your question - it feels like you've misunderstood something. In case that's true, let me explain a little further. Some time ago PG observed that deep comment threads tended to consist mostly of people getting snarky with each other. He speculated that the snarkiness might be reduced by preventing people from replying to each other immediately, without any cooling off period. To that end, and since it seemed to occur primarily on deeper threads, he instigated an exponential back-off on comments. As a thread gets deeper, so the delay increases before the reply box appears. I don't have hard figures to hand, but I feel like the snarkiness in deeper threads has indeed been reduced, and I don't feel that the quality of conversation has diminished. One could worry that good comments aren't made because the commenter has to wait and doesn't bother, but I've seen no evidence of that. If that hasn't answered your question then perhaps you could rephrase it and try again.
- jlgaddis 13y agoI submitted a link a few days ago about a possible IE 0-day in the wild and it immediately became "[dead]". It's the first submission I've ever made and I haven't, AFAIK, broken any HN rules since I finally created my account (after years of lurking). On a related note, you will be hellbanned if you create an HN account over Tor (even if you "don't do anything wrong"). Considering the recent NSA revelations, I think that's pretty unfair but, hey, what can ya do...
- codesuela 13y agoIt's either that or implementing captchas. And I think pg is not very motivated to do the latter. edit: top of my head reply/speculation so I don't claim any factual accuracy.
- nwh 13y agoBlocking Tor won't stop any spam. Real spammers have tens of thousands of unique addresses to use; why would they use the 300 or so exit nodes that Tor has available?
- Kudos 13y agoBlocking Tor stops plenty of spam. Boards.ie blocked Tor and watched spam fall off a cliff.
- buro9 13y agoAs someone who runs some large boards, blocking Tor stops trolls. Does very little for spam. For spam, http://www.stopforumspam.com http://www.stopforumspam.com is pretty awesome. But most likely because the few people who have written scripts for vBulletin or phpBB attempt to hit all of the vBulletin and phpBB sites... so it works pretty well for that group. May have zero effect on something like HN where an entirely different approach may be used (cheap labour?).
- deleted 13y ago
- damienkatz 13y agoPosting out of turn? That's a banning. Posting from the wrong browser window? That's a banning. Staring at my post? That's a banning. Post about banning? Oh, better believe that's a banning.
- derefr 13y agoI'd upvote you, but I'm pretty sure that's a banning.
- kmfrk 13y agoThe algorithms have no parameters for mercy.
- shiven 13y agoThat reminds of the Dwarf Fortress motto 'Losing is Fun', only that it is also inevitable! The algos will eventually win...
- josscrowcroft 13y agohttp://xkcd.com/144/ http://xkcd.com/144/
- krapp 13y agoThey cannot be bargained with. They cannot be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, remorse or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are banned.
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- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- anthonyb 13y agoI just took a look at the new page, and it doesn't look any different to normal. The users of those posts aren't necessarily hellbanned - the posts are though. If enough people flag a new story I think it'll automatically be marked dead. Usually it's just for spammy crap, or stories that aren't very interesting.
- runn1ng 13y agoYou have to set "showdead" as "yes" in Profile settings.
- wikiburner 13y agoWe're actually discussing the flagging situation here, in a thread that was flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155513 I don't think many stories get flagged just on the new page. It's usually domains that are flagged, like buzzfeed.com, huffingtonpost.com, or gawker.com. It sounds like maybe there was a bug in the server today.
- anthonyb 13y agoTons of stories get flagged on the new page. They're usually spam. In this case, it's part of a policy not to discuss meta-hn issues on hn. If you start a post asking why you were hell banned, or flagging/downvoting, it'll usually get flagged and/or removed.
- rjsw 13y agoSome of the dead posts look to be duplicates of live ones.
- jmckib 13y agoInteresting blog post on it here http://toway1234.tumblr.com/post/16021243707/hacker-news-hellbanning-is-unacceptable http://toway1234.tumblr.com/post/16021243707/hacker-news-hel...
- sunstone 13y agoI've been hell banned for a long time. Not sure why. Sure, I could make a new account but that would just condone capricious behaviour.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sjtgraham 13y agoEmailing info@ycombinator.com is the way to get these questions answered.
- northwest 13y agoAn open discussion has the benefit of generating valuable feedback for PG.
- sjtgraham 13y agoI may or may not agree with you, but my comment only considers HN rules and that there is a strong precedent for these HN-policy meta-discussions to be killed by mods.
- northwest 13y ago> there is a strong precedent for these HN-policy meta-discussions to be killed by mods. If this is true, it would be a pretty sad state of affairs. If such a discussion comes up, it's because of a lack of transparency.
- ColinWright 13y agoIt is true, and for me it is not a sad state of affairs. I've seen more sites killed by excessive meta-discussion than almost anything else. More, true "transparency" frequently just leads to more meta-discussion about the minutiae, and constant bickering about nuances of interpretation. Personally, I think PG is striking a good balance. If you disagree you are, of course, free to go elsewhere and/or start an alternative community, and solve all the problenms in your own way.
- josephpmay 13y agoTo be perfectly honest, I hadn't reviewed the HN guidelines in awhile, and I forgot about that one. If I have an issue in the future I'll be sure to do that, however, I think this discussion is valuable to the HN community, and it would be unwise for me to delete this post.
- jfriedly 13y agoAn example: First alpha release of Python 3.4 is out (python.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155423 It probably linked to [1], but all we can tell is that it was something at python.org. The post was by plessthanpt05, an HN user for about two years with 838 karma. All of his/her posts from the past year or so are dead (about 60 of them). They don't appear to be a bot. Python 3.4.0a1 isn't something that would interest everyone on HN, but it certainly doesn't seem like the kind of thing that should have been killed. [1] http://python.org/download/releases/3.4.0/ http://python.org/download/releases/3.4.0/ Edit: more details on plessthanpt05
- bnr 13y agoWell, that user also posted over 60 links in the last year, while never receiving a single upvote or comment. I'm not sure why a flesh-and-blood user would still be posting after that.
- Too 13y agoMaybe hellbanning adds random upvotes to deceive the poster even further?
- ics 13y ago"Saved links" might be one reason. While I wouldn't advocate using HN as a personal bookmark service it does lessen the burn a bit if nobody else comments/votes on it. The good thing is that if you use saved links for that it makes you think twice about what sort of things you should be submitting.
- consz 13y agoI posted here for a year after getting hellbanned before realizing. It happens.
- kefka 13y agoOn another account, I checked regularly for possible hellban status. Lo and behold, I caught it about 3 days in. Of course, I didn't even use HN for the first of those 2 days. This day, I spend more of my time on subreddits that share HN's enthusiasm and knowledge without the subterfuge of hellbans.
- jackson5 13y agoHN no longer stands for HackerNews, now it stands for the Hellban News
- kyro 13y agoAnyone notice how if you reverse the letters PG and prepend it with K for karma, you get the KGP?
- rfrey 13y agoThat's true! Also, if you reverse your username, add a graphic "1" to the first letter and add 2 and 3 to the next two (don't forget to wraparound!), you get "duck". You can't fool me, mallard!
- xraycharlie 13y agoIf I make a comment, any comment, and it gets two or more downvotes, I assume the account has been hellbanned and abandon the account. Why? Because it's happened to me many times in the past. I create new accounts often. The thought police cannot stop me.
- igravious 13y agoThat's ridiculous. I often get down-voted for some of my more bone-headed, humorously off-topic or bad faith posts. Well, not _very_ often (generally I'm a good soul) but you get the point. If you're not making this up and this has happened to you many times then maybe you should consider the possibility that your posts are not adding anything of benefit to the site. I created one account initially and went from there. I have never even felt the need to create an alter-ego, and evil twin or a "posting-while-drunk" safe account. Hope that helps. Think twice or thrice before you hit the "reply" button.
- pubby 13y ago>you should consider the possibility that your posts are not adding anything of benefit to the site. ...such as when your thoughtful posts don't show up because you got hellbanned for a single post the mods/algorithm didn't like. And when considering the odds, it makes sense to create new accounts.
- digipaper 13y agoAm I banned?
- lnanek2 13y agoThe mods seem to use it as their version of voting. I see perfectly fine stories banned all the time, consistently over a period of months. The same with users. Lots of times I'll look in a thread and see lots of dead people who don't know they are dead, posting interesting and useful stuff. I've run forums and image posting sites before, the trouble isn't finding moderators from the community who will work for free. The trouble is finding ones that won't abuse their power.
- stcredzero 13y agoThere now seems to be a subset of Internet denizens who are invested in a culture of pattern-matching and parroting snarky self-righteous knee-jerk reactions. Even more disturbing, is that many of these people have been indoctrinated to believe that this is "clever" somehow, even though it involves nothing more sophisticated than ELIZA. Going around thinking you're superior because you're connected is just as shallow online as it was for country clubs. Please actually process ideas if you comment on HN.
- arcameron 13y agoI've been hellbanned at least a few times while trying to show HN the OSS project I've been working on :( In /r/programming on reddit, it was shadowbanned as soon as it was posted. It's pretty frustrating and it's making me want to contribute to HN less. https://chat.echoplex.us https://chat.echoplex.us https://github.com/qq99/echoplexus https://github.com/qq99/echoplexus
- dakimov 13y agoThis is the most retarded site I have posted on so far.
- pg 13y agoMost of those accounts are a sockpuppet ring. They tend to all post at once, which means when they do the new page is mostly dead if you have showdead turned on. I explained this in a comment about a week or two ago, the last time someone freaked about about banned accounts. Next time someone wants to do that, would you please email us, as it says in the guidelines? That would have saved a lot of people a lot of time.