4 ms·

I'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 e

by eksith 13y ago

I'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 ago
There'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 ago
  For 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 ago
    How long is the limit after which you are allowed to express a criticism?
    - ColinWright 13y ago
      I 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.
  - kmfrk 13y ago
    Have a set of clear rules (and not vague non-language like "don't write non-hacker, off-topic stuff") - AND ENFORCE IT, visibly. Unenforced rules aren't rules. Unclarified rules aren't rules. Whenever someone is penalized, point them to the specific rules they violated. And keep in mind that people make mistakes every now and then. Show largesse. This isn't a production line where flawed products are tossed out at the blink of an eye. Last, don't view everything as a "problem" to be "solved". We're talking about human beings, not Turing-complete automatons. That's a big part of the problem with how HN is run. You will never "solve" this the way you would a bug. You need a human element to address something human. Treating everyone like a spam bot only works for spam bots, and has the side effect of pissing off the human false positives.
    - dasil003 13y ago
      Hellbanning is necessary because of the low barrier to creating a new account. You are assuming that all users are well-intentioned and can be reasoned with, but this is simply not the case. Any sizable only community will develop a number of hard-core anti-social trolls exhibiting behavior which they can only undertake online (because in real life they would get their asses kicked on a regular basis). When said trolls are also hackers you need some relatively automated and powerful tools to keep them in check. It's unfortunate that there is some collateral damage, but please understand that the choice is not between new users being inconvenienced for not, the choice is between HN being a place where civilized discourse can exist and spiraling towards a 4chan-like atmosphere.
      - lmm 13y ago
        Serious trolls know about hellbanning and how to figure out whether an account they're using has been hellbanned. The primary effect of hellbanning is to drive away well intentioned new users who are unlucky enough to break some of the unwritten rules in their first few posts.
        stcredzero 13y ago
        How do you know this? Have you run a forum or community website, or have you been on the other side? Serious question. Must know data and provenance of data.
  - eksith 13y ago
    I can't speak for that user, but I ran a forum from around 1997 to 2008 (directly involved until 2005). Interventions helped. This only works with moderators who aren't narcissistic, megalomaniacal and/or sociopathic (marginally or beyond). When snark got to be irritating, we would issue a written warning privately. If that went ignored, we'd revoke posting privileges for a day or two (sometimes longer if it's a bad case). Worst offenders got banned. This worked fairly well because our forum was invite only, a bit like Gmail's early days. If we found that troublesome users were invited from the same set of accounts, we'd issue warnings to the entire tree, so to speak, or in the worst case, kill it with lightning. Above all else, mods were forbidden from identifying themselves in any way as mods as long as they had the privilege (this will cycle on and off as needed between a select pool of users). We also had some peculiar rules : http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/harshest-forum-rules-ever/ http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/harshest-forum-rules-... As they say, most people are basically good. Sometimes they are surprisingly unaware of how hurtful their posts can be. There's a dehumanizing effect introduced when your communications are filtered through text and suddenly there isn't a "person" per-se at the other end. When this is pointed out to them, usually they understand and adjust themselves. There are exceptions to this, of course, and the best way to deal with them is to not interact, entertain or in any way give them an audience. Hellbanning in this regard isn't my favorite technique, but it seems to work to some degree. Now that would only be acceptable if its application is flawless. Sadly, from from what we've seen so far, it isn't. Edit: Just remembered that I wrote a (longer) spiel about this a little while ago http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/re-wordpress-com-forum-options/ http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/re-wordpress-com-foru...
    - stcredzero 13y ago
      > Interventions helped. This only works with moderators who aren't narcissistic, megalomaniacal and/or sociopathic Unfortunately, the Internet, startups, programming, and social media attract all seem to attract narcissistic, megalomaniacal and/or sociopathic types.
  - larrys 13y ago
    "I'd love to hear how you solve the problem." While this is fair question for sure not being able to solve a problem (right away) and identifying a problem are two completely different things. Especially when asked to solve a problem as if it's a question on a test. And the fact that a problem is hard to solve or someone doesn't have an immediate answer doesn't mean there isn't a problem to be solved. Nor does it matter if they have ever run a popular discussion web site either. In the real world to "solve a problem" such as this would take thought, time and testing all of which a commenter is not going to be able to do a good job of in a "reply" to a question posed here. Most likely no low hanging fruit of a reply available. I was asked a few days ago "well what would you have done then if you were Snowden?". As if I'm supposed to be able to come up with or commit to a response that makes sense on the spot. I simply won't do that.
  - mscarborough 13y ago
    > what measures do you take to reduce the increased snarkiness > I'd love to hear how you solve the problem. You've exemplified the problem perfectly. Next time, don't comment.
    - ColinWright 13y ago
      Perhaps my comment was a little snarky, but perhaps you missed the point. perhaps I was a little too subtle, or perhaps my phrasing was poor and ill-judged. Regardless of those considerations, my question is genuine. I see a lot or criticisms here of the technical measures taken to prevent or ameliorate particular issues, expressed by people who have idealistic opinions and points of view, but with zero experience of actually dealing with the problems. That is starting to annoy me more and more, and perhaps that irritation seeped into my reply. But the point remains. The reply back-off was implemented to help reduce the snarkiness in long threads. My feeling (with no hard evidence) is that it has worked tolerably well. My question is genuine - if this annoys kmfrk, then how has kmfrk dealt with it in the past? If kmfrk has neither experienced it, nor implemented a solution, then I feel the criticism is misplaced. In conclusion, probably next time I won't comment.
- powertower 13y ago
  Tell me about it! I edit my posts probably 3-5 times after making them to remove spelling mistakes, correct grammar, and make whatever changes are needed (quickly after posting). This seems to trigger the slowdown after the second or third edit. I also got hellband a year or two ago for submitting either a few links that made it to front-page - but then were flagged by people for political reasons, or posting a negative-Apple submit (the last non DOA submit) that might have upset a mod (titled "Brokerages Race To Feed Apple To The Muppets"). My comments show up, but all my submits are DOA.
  - kmfrk 13y ago
    Jacobian (of Django fame) has also been banned for speaking out against sexism. There must be some moderators/admins with axes to grind. I mean, it's friggin' Jacobian, for Pete's sake.
    - rattray 13y ago
      Side note: jacobian's djangobook.com is languishing and needs help. The latest commit message was a grim "Add more explicit warnings about the status of the book". See the current index.rst: https://github.com/jacobian/djangobook.com/blob/master/index.rst https://github.com/jacobian/djangobook.com/blob/master/index...
    - Nitramp 13y ago
      I'm sure you meant Jacobinian? ;-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin
  - wikiburner 13y ago
    We're actually having an interesting conversation here about abusive flagging, in a thread I posted earlier today that was, ironically enough, abusively flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155513
  - yapcguy 13y ago
    When you submit, why aren't you told that your submissions are DOA? Instead, you get no warning, so you believe your submissions have been accepted, when in fact nobody else can see them. If you click the "New" link you actually see your own submissions, but since nobody else can, they never get any votes. This is quite deceptive and probably done to keep you interested in the site, until you figure out you have less "rights" than other visitors.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
throwaway_a 13y ago
I'm so scared to post anything that's too far from the mainstream because I don't want my 2nd account to just get destroyed. It's actually an account I want people to be able to find when Google-searching me. I end up making throwaway accts to post opinions that I highly suspect won't be popular on HN. I think the fact that downvotng can get an account marked dead is a bad design. A comment getting flagged by a bunch of people should cause dead status after manual review, but just because I post something that HN doesn't agree with, shouldn't ghostban me. Especially considering HN isn't the most diverse community on the interwebz and someone might have a different view if they're not a financially-stable heterosexual American white male...
- tptacek 13y ago
  Downvoting can't get your account marked dead.
  - throwaway_a 13y ago
    Is there somewhere I can read where PG officially says that? Because the last account I had got marked dead and I don't think I did anything other than post a non-popular opinion. That comment got something like negative 18. A day or 2 later, [dead]. Maybe it was just a coincidence since, after all, there are plenty of dead-accounts that when I look through their activity-history nothing jumps out at me as a punishable HN-offense.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Nope, there's nowhere you can read that directly says that, but it is true nonetheless.
      - throwaway_a 13y ago
        Heh, okay. Can't argue with that ;)

by eksith 13y ago

kmfrk 13y ago

There'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 ago
For 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 ago
  How long is the limit after which you are allowed to express a criticism?
  - ColinWright 13y ago
    I 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.
- kmfrk 13y ago
  Have a set of clear rules (and not vague non-language like "don't write non-hacker, off-topic stuff") - AND ENFORCE IT, visibly. Unenforced rules aren't rules. Unclarified rules aren't rules. Whenever someone is penalized, point them to the specific rules they violated. And keep in mind that people make mistakes every now and then. Show largesse. This isn't a production line where flawed products are tossed out at the blink of an eye. Last, don't view everything as a "problem" to be "solved". We're talking about human beings, not Turing-complete automatons. That's a big part of the problem with how HN is run. You will never "solve" this the way you would a bug. You need a human element to address something human. Treating everyone like a spam bot only works for spam bots, and has the side effect of pissing off the human false positives.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    Hellbanning is necessary because of the low barrier to creating a new account. You are assuming that all users are well-intentioned and can be reasoned with, but this is simply not the case. Any sizable only community will develop a number of hard-core anti-social trolls exhibiting behavior which they can only undertake online (because in real life they would get their asses kicked on a regular basis). When said trolls are also hackers you need some relatively automated and powerful tools to keep them in check. It's unfortunate that there is some collateral damage, but please understand that the choice is not between new users being inconvenienced for not, the choice is between HN being a place where civilized discourse can exist and spiraling towards a 4chan-like atmosphere.
    - lmm 13y ago
      Serious trolls know about hellbanning and how to figure out whether an account they're using has been hellbanned. The primary effect of hellbanning is to drive away well intentioned new users who are unlucky enough to break some of the unwritten rules in their first few posts.
      - stcredzero 13y ago
        How do you know this? Have you run a forum or community website, or have you been on the other side? Serious question. Must know data and provenance of data.
- eksith 13y ago
  I can't speak for that user, but I ran a forum from around 1997 to 2008 (directly involved until 2005). Interventions helped. This only works with moderators who aren't narcissistic, megalomaniacal and/or sociopathic (marginally or beyond). When snark got to be irritating, we would issue a written warning privately. If that went ignored, we'd revoke posting privileges for a day or two (sometimes longer if it's a bad case). Worst offenders got banned. This worked fairly well because our forum was invite only, a bit like Gmail's early days. If we found that troublesome users were invited from the same set of accounts, we'd issue warnings to the entire tree, so to speak, or in the worst case, kill it with lightning. Above all else, mods were forbidden from identifying themselves in any way as mods as long as they had the privilege (this will cycle on and off as needed between a select pool of users). We also had some peculiar rules : http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/harshest-forum-rules-ever/ http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/harshest-forum-rules-... As they say, most people are basically good. Sometimes they are surprisingly unaware of how hurtful their posts can be. There's a dehumanizing effect introduced when your communications are filtered through text and suddenly there isn't a "person" per-se at the other end. When this is pointed out to them, usually they understand and adjust themselves. There are exceptions to this, of course, and the best way to deal with them is to not interact, entertain or in any way give them an audience. Hellbanning in this regard isn't my favorite technique, but it seems to work to some degree. Now that would only be acceptable if its application is flawless. Sadly, from from what we've seen so far, it isn't. Edit: Just remembered that I wrote a (longer) spiel about this a little while ago http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/re-wordpress-com-forum-options/ http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/re-wordpress-com-foru...
  - stcredzero 13y ago
    > Interventions helped. This only works with moderators who aren't narcissistic, megalomaniacal and/or sociopathic Unfortunately, the Internet, startups, programming, and social media attract all seem to attract narcissistic, megalomaniacal and/or sociopathic types.
- larrys 13y ago
  "I'd love to hear how you solve the problem." While this is fair question for sure not being able to solve a problem (right away) and identifying a problem are two completely different things. Especially when asked to solve a problem as if it's a question on a test. And the fact that a problem is hard to solve or someone doesn't have an immediate answer doesn't mean there isn't a problem to be solved. Nor does it matter if they have ever run a popular discussion web site either. In the real world to "solve a problem" such as this would take thought, time and testing all of which a commenter is not going to be able to do a good job of in a "reply" to a question posed here. Most likely no low hanging fruit of a reply available. I was asked a few days ago "well what would you have done then if you were Snowden?". As if I'm supposed to be able to come up with or commit to a response that makes sense on the spot. I simply won't do that.
- mscarborough 13y ago
  > what measures do you take to reduce the increased snarkiness > I'd love to hear how you solve the problem. You've exemplified the problem perfectly. Next time, don't comment.
  - ColinWright 13y ago
    Perhaps my comment was a little snarky, but perhaps you missed the point. perhaps I was a little too subtle, or perhaps my phrasing was poor and ill-judged. Regardless of those considerations, my question is genuine. I see a lot or criticisms here of the technical measures taken to prevent or ameliorate particular issues, expressed by people who have idealistic opinions and points of view, but with zero experience of actually dealing with the problems. That is starting to annoy me more and more, and perhaps that irritation seeped into my reply. But the point remains. The reply back-off was implemented to help reduce the snarkiness in long threads. My feeling (with no hard evidence) is that it has worked tolerably well. My question is genuine - if this annoys kmfrk, then how has kmfrk dealt with it in the past? If kmfrk has neither experienced it, nor implemented a solution, then I feel the criticism is misplaced. In conclusion, probably next time I won't comment.
powertower 13y ago
Tell me about it! I edit my posts probably 3-5 times after making them to remove spelling mistakes, correct grammar, and make whatever changes are needed (quickly after posting). This seems to trigger the slowdown after the second or third edit. I also got hellband a year or two ago for submitting either a few links that made it to front-page - but then were flagged by people for political reasons, or posting a negative-Apple submit (the last non DOA submit) that might have upset a mod (titled "Brokerages Race To Feed Apple To The Muppets"). My comments show up, but all my submits are DOA.
- kmfrk 13y ago
  Jacobian (of Django fame) has also been banned for speaking out against sexism. There must be some moderators/admins with axes to grind. I mean, it's friggin' Jacobian, for Pete's sake.
  - rattray 13y ago
    Side note: jacobian's djangobook.com is languishing and needs help. The latest commit message was a grim "Add more explicit warnings about the status of the book". See the current index.rst: https://github.com/jacobian/djangobook.com/blob/master/index.rst https://github.com/jacobian/djangobook.com/blob/master/index...
  - Nitramp 13y ago
    I'm sure you meant Jacobinian? ;-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin
- wikiburner 13y ago
  We're actually having an interesting conversation here about abusive flagging, in a thread I posted earlier today that was, ironically enough, abusively flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155513
- yapcguy 13y ago
  When you submit, why aren't you told that your submissions are DOA? Instead, you get no warning, so you believe your submissions have been accepted, when in fact nobody else can see them. If you click the "New" link you actually see your own submissions, but since nobody else can, they never get any votes. This is quite deceptive and probably done to keep you interested in the site, until you figure out you have less "rights" than other visitors.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

throwaway_a 13y ago

I'm so scared to post anything that's too far from the mainstream because I don't want my 2nd account to just get destroyed. It's actually an account I want people to be able to find when Google-searching me. I end up making throwaway accts to post opinions that I highly suspect won't be popular on HN. I think the fact that downvotng can get an account marked dead is a bad design. A comment getting flagged by a bunch of people should cause dead status after manual review, but just because I post something that HN doesn't agree with, shouldn't ghostban me. Especially considering HN isn't the most diverse community on the interwebz and someone might have a different view if they're not a financially-stable heterosexual American white male...

tptacek 13y ago
Downvoting can't get your account marked dead.
- throwaway_a 13y ago
  Is there somewhere I can read where PG officially says that? Because the last account I had got marked dead and I don't think I did anything other than post a non-popular opinion. That comment got something like negative 18. A day or 2 later, [dead]. Maybe it was just a coincidence since, after all, there are plenty of dead-accounts that when I look through their activity-history nothing jumps out at me as a punishable HN-offense.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Nope, there's nowhere you can read that directly says that, but it is true nonetheless.
    - throwaway_a 13y ago
      Heh, okay. Can't argue with that ;)