[looprecur]

I agree. Hacker News has a lot great people on it.

Karma, however, is a joke because accounts are regularly nuked for no good reason, which necessitates starting over at zero. Hellbanning spammers and outright trolls makes sense. Hellbanning good posters who make one annoying comment is ridiculous. If you don't like what someone has to say, disagree with him. (This is also why I don't like downvoting without a reply; I think people who object to something should say why they object to it.)

[swombat]

I've made a prodigious amount of comments, and I'm sure some of them were quite stupid, and yet my account hasn't been banned. So have most of the people on the leaderboard. I guess it's not "one annoying comment", but a) how bad the comment is, and b) how much contribution that user had made in the past.

[looprecur]

You don't get to the leaderboard if your account is nuked. Survivor bias.

Admittedly I've said things that are immature and stupid and that I regret. None of them merited the destruction of 2000+ karma account. Not a one. The banning policy around here is extremely inconsistent.

Also, I once got hellbanned for comparing Clojure favorably over Arc. (Although Arc wins on aesthetics, Clojure has the JVM libraries which is a win in the real world. That was the gist of my argument, and enough to merit a ban.) The ban policy on HN is heavy-handed, inconsistent, destructive and, quite frankly, moronic. If Paul Graham is directly responsible, he should be embarrassed; if others are doing the trigger-happy banning, he should revoke these powers.