[interlagos]

I've been hellbanned here on HN on at least three different IP addresses and accounts...that I am aware of. Probably more.

In each case nothing I'd ever said would be considered trolling by any rational observer. Here on HN, however, as with most communities where you start to recognize the regulars (tptacek, raganwald, etc), "trolling" is redefined to simply mean "going against the grain".

There was one discussion that I participated where I predicted that Apple would see declining profit margins due to increased competition. Remarkably this completely benign, seemingly obvious observation saw me declared a troll, and shortly thereafter yet another account was hellbanned from HN (whatever the mechanism -- is this the verdict of a bored PG, or has he anointed some particularly under-employed members to apply it? -- it is horribly broken).

Troll is, more often than not, a term used to circle the wagons.

[teej]

In the last 6 months I've been running an experiment. An experiment to make Hacker News better. Because I felt Hacker News was going to shit in several ways and I felt like I could help.

I couldn't stop naive newbies from making dumb comments, but I could stop fanboyism and groupthink.

I decided that I was going to take a different approach to commenting. In essence, I wanted to be like DHH - highly opinionated, strongly worded, and unafraid to call people out. To ensure comment integrity, I stuck only to topics in which I strongly felt I was in the right.

patio11, joshu, tptacek and pg were some of the people I spoke out against. I made the argument that those people were flat-out wrong. But not just that, I clarified -why- they were wrong in a reasoned way. And that was the key - explaining why. It turns out that people DID care about the truth. People WERE willing to hear out an alternate view and they voted with their upvotes.

I was able to move my karma from 3.5k to 5k and move my average from 7 to 14 per comment. Many of my comments took a very contrarian view to the HN status quo. Many of them were directly targeted at the "HN elite". All of them took their share of downvotes from those who thought my comments didn't add value. But in the end, they were the most successful comments I've ever made.

So don't lose hope! There is a way out of groupthink. But it takes hard work, great communication, and an academic view of persuasion. In the end, I think reasoned and rational discussion is what makes HN great, let's get back to that.

[tshtf]

In the last 6 months I conducted a different experiment.

I turned on "showdead" and looked through the posting history of users with dead posts. About a quarter of the time, I would have disagreed with the hellbanning.

If you're going to ban a user, you might as well be honest and tell them up front.

[JoachimSchipper]

I occasionally repost unjustly [dead] comments, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2967831. See http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22[dead]%2... for more examples. This is a useful safety valve on HN's moderation, and I wish more people did it. (Of course, I only resurrect posts that clearly shouldn't have been killed.)

It's also possible to track down contact information for most HN users, either via "about" or Google. I have notified several hellbanned people who were (now) making useful contributions to HN. After all, if people have learned to behave they should be encouraged to participate. (Of course, some people are spammers or incorrigible, see e.g. "los etho s" without spaces.)

[nirvana]

I have showdead turned on as well. It breaks my heart to see these comments from people who are trying to contribute. I don't go look up all their past history, but I'd say %75 of the comments are attempts to contribute to the conversation (even if they aren't great attempts or original) and about %25 are just comments that don't really add anything, but aren't really offensive or spammy or inappropriate.

[billpatrianakos]

I have gone through the history of a few people like the ones you mention and I have to say that I didn't really see anything worthy of banning. In every case I looked at (around 10 or 15 I think) I saw comments that were either sincere but not adding too much value (mediocre, let's say) or sometimes just not in agreement with popular opinion.

The really screwed up thing is that I've looked through the comment and submission histories of obvious spammers and I saw a guy with about 132 spam submissions with an account about as old as mine (almost 200 days) and his account wasn't banned. It seems that you can disagree around here but only to a point.

I get that maybe some are afraid of diluting the community but by being so overly sensitive you can really be doing everyone a disservice. Lately I feel like I have to watch out for the karma police. The guys who downvote anything that disagrees too much even if it's totally rational and put in as nice of terms as possible. And despite protests from the "in" crowd it really does seem like what they say gets auto-up voted. Experiments be damned, that reputation and age of any one profile really can make or break you.

Here's an experiment I'd like to see:

Pg, patio11, edw, reagawald, and the others all make new profiles and about commenting as always while not letting slip who they really are. Then let's see if their karma and average end up climbing at their usual rate.

[DiabloD3]

In short, you can't stop the group think.

Continuing from this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354448

I'm not even sure if I get the point of trying either. I mean, I believe I have provided at least some value to HN, but every time I've "been unafraid to call people out", all I got was a bunch of crap for it.

Although you say we shouldn't lose hope, I think I already have. Its frustrating to have to deal with people claiming everything is the next new previous thing or the new black or the new white or the new Apple or the new Google or whatever else meme you can think of it.

I find startups intriguing, I like deeply scientific and mathematical discussions, I like hearing about stuff going on in the open source world. You'd think HN would be my thing, but there are simply elements of the HN community that rub me the wrong way and no matter how much you try to stop them, no matter how many times you down vote them, they just keep coming back stronger than before.

Honestly, there are just some people here who'd be happier over at 4chan than here, and I wish they'd just go.

BTW, I expect to get downvoted for this, and I don't care. I don't sugar coat the truth, and I'm sure as hell not going to start now.

[billpatrianakos]

Can you be more explicit about who or what type of people those are that'd be more at home on 4chan? I'm just curious. I often times feel like maybe I shouldn't be here either. It took me a while before I quit being a lurker and sometimes I wonder "am I HN material or do I belong with the rest of the riff raff?"

[DiabloD3]

I don't think its possible to differentiate the two. Some people intentionally cause trouble, some constantly but unintentionally drag threads off topic, some think "math is hard, hey lets go shopping".

There is no clear cut definition. Although, if you're asking the question if you should be here the answer is implied to be yes since you bothered to ask the question in the first place.

[tokenadult]

Your user name wasn't immediately familiar to me, but I see when I look back at your comments that I remember some of those very well. You have indeed posted some comments in the last few months that provide good examples of disagreeing with groupthink while referring to facts and acknowledging other points of view.

I have a different style (I think I don't ever f-bomb in online comments) but your manner of making comments is food for thought, especially on issues where what I've learned in more than five decades of life experience leads to different conclusions from the majority opinion here on HN.

[nirvana]

You had 3.5k karma before beginning this experiment and you're a cofounder of a YC funded company! You're already part of the "in" group.

The first comment prior to this one on your comments feed starts of with: "Your entire comment is bullshit and it pisses me off. You've never worked at Zynga, so to purport that you know exactly what it's like to work there is bullshit. Your comment reflects exactly what Silicon Valley nerds think of Zynga externally. They think that Zynga is nothing but people refining skinner boxes for people to play in. You've probably seen one or two talks of Mark Pincus talking about "doing every dirty trick in the book" or something like that. Have you ever met him? Do you even know the last time he worked directly on a game? You're allowed to have whatever opinion you like, but this opinion is bullshit. Your entire comment is ridiculously biased and unreflective of Zynga internally or externally."

This part of your response is mostly a characterization of the commentator based on your own speculation about whether he's worked at Zynga or met Mark Pincus. While strictly speaking you're only characterizing the comment, this comes off as a personal attack to me.

Meanwhile, other people have been hell banned for linking to wikipedia pages defending scientific facts, because those facts go against the dominant ideology on hacker news (or that of the people with their finger on the ban button.)

I'm tired of hearing the refrain that reason and rationality rule the day here, when it seems pretty clear to me that if you're a liberal, an apple hater, an open source advocate who opposes property rights, you get a free pass for personal insults, but if you're none of those things, no matter how reasoned or rational you are, you risk being hellbanned.

I try to restrict myself only to commenting on safe subjects for that reason. I'm actually worried that disagreeing with you will result in me getting hellbanned. That's not the kind of environment where "reasoned and rational discussion" are really going to flourish.

[teej]

To be clear, my "foundership" of a YC company wasn't publicly knowledge until 4 weeks ago.

My last comment isn't my greatest accomplishment. I'd hope that my behavior would be looked at in whole, instead of cherrypicked.

That being said, I was characterizing the general feeling of HN as a whole. Of the 100k+ readership of HN, very few are actual Zynga employees. So in that light, I defend my comment. There is a large anti-Zynga sentiment on HN and that sentiment is driven by media-fueled propaganda.

I can't account for why others have been hell-banned or downvoted. But from my experience being very contrarian in my own way, I haven't seen that at all. In fact, I've seen the exact opposite.

[georgemcbay]

Of the 100k+ readership of HN, very few are actual employees of any single company. Does that mean we can't discuss any companies here?

[lookhard]

"Don't criticize Zynga because you don't have any actual real-life experience with what it's like! And don't criticize me and my comments with actual real-life experience of my comments! You're just being spoonfed the message that whale-hunting "social" "games" aren't actually good for you!"

[teej]

It's not like that. I want people to make a reasoned opinion based on the big picture, not just on what Mike Arrington says. There are plenty of reasons to hate Zynga. The reasons TechCrunch and WSJ feed you are crappy reasons.

[mirkules]

"I'm actually worried that disagreeing with you will result in me getting hellbanned"

Why do people worry about getting banned? It's just a screen name, it's not like you can't just make another one. Even if it's based on IP address, hacker news should be full of people that know how to get around that.

Just sayin' - if you've got something smart, constructive to say, say it. Who cares about banning if it's what you really believe in?

My personal rule about posting is simple: if a future employer links my HN profile to the "real" me, would that be grounds for not getting the job (or losing a job with my current employer)? If yes, then it's probably neither smart nor constructive, so doesn't belong on HN.

[tomkarlo]

It's not about the difficulty of making a replacement account. It's about the loss of profile / reputation / recognition. The longer a user has been contributing, the more painful losing all of that becomes.

[mirkules]

I guess I never saw it that way. Personally, I don't really care for reputation / reputation. Case in point, I've been on HN for almost 2 years, and I only recognize a handful of names: patio11, edw(somenumber), tptacek and pg. Usually, I read comments without even looking at the name, unless the comment is so profound that I have to know who said it This is why those 4 stick in my mind - they have said incredibly insightful things many times - I'm sure that a) they always say what they want and b) they have enough karma to burn anyway (e.g. patio's post about SEO for which he got absolutely blasted).

[tomkarlo]

I'm sure they'll be really bummed if they had to give up their name and start from scratch. It's not an issue of numeric karma. It's brand value.

[mithaler]

There was one discussion that I participated where I predicted that Apple would see declining profit margins due to increased competition. Remarkably this completely benign, seemingly obvious observation saw me declared a troll, and shortly thereafter yet another account was hellbanned from HN.

I'm curious--can you paste the text of that comment here if you still have it? It's possible that, for example, it was your tone that got you downvoted, not your message. Or it could have been the community perceiving you to be ignoring evidence, or any number of other things. In any case, this claim here isn't sufficient for us to judge the fairness of the response.

[gbog]

There has been some threads where any comment that was not a praise of Steve Jobs and Apple was downvoted. Sometimes I feel fragmentation on HN, was is upvoted in a thread is downvoted in another.

[einhverfr]

I have watched posts of my own go upvoted then downvoted then up voted then down voted more or less randomly.

FWIW I do NOT think people should downvote based on disagreement. I think downvotes should be sparsely used and I personally upvote even people I disagree with.

[gbog]

Well, maybe, but now I am using thread upvote mostly to promote themes I like to see on HN, and comment downvotes to push down thanks, me-too, or otherwise empty answers.

[tripzilch]

I agree that hellbanning on HN is completely out of control.

I've seen people (that otherwise posted useful contributions, before and after) hellbanned for making a rather tasteless joke. The joke was sufficiently tasteless that I can totally see a moderator suspending or even banning that user. But not hellbanning. Not that it's strictly worse or anything, it's just so utterly useless and childish.

This user had no idea that anything had happened, and he just kept posting for weeks. All that wasted time! And I'm fairly sure that if a moderator would have just told him "hey we'd rather not have people make jokes about dead children here" the guy would have replied "right, my bad that was out of line, won't happen again" cause the rest of his comments didn't seem very inflammatory or anything.

Instead the guy gets no message at all and keeps on posting invisibly. A regular ban would have at least sent some message.

... and then there's these things I've heard about people getting temporary hellbans? So people can come back all butthurt after realizing they've been tricked into invisibly wasting their time? That's the dumbest kind of moderation I've ever heard about, really. A hellban should be forever, or not at all. There is no such thing as a "hell suspension".

[shiven]

The hellbanning is what turned me off commenting and sharing my opinions on HN. With the passage of time, what was once a forum to discuss (and openly dissent) ideas feels like an old boys club ... with a few anointed head goons to keep the order (and teach newcomers a lesson with zealous downvoting and hellbanning), a few ol timers who still act decently in hopes that HN may yet regain its spirit (as they remember it) and the rest of the crowd filled with the usual riff-raff on any web forum who have no idea what HN started off as and will probably never care. PG, HN was (is?) a great idea and a great place and well worth the while. Burned two handles over the years, getting the hang of it, but by then it was no longer the place I liked.

I'll keep lurking, at least for now.

Good luck.

[eldude]

I'm absolutely shocked and disgusted to be be reading this discussion regarding being "hellbanned" only to discover that my account in fact has been hellbanned for the past 1.5 yrs without even knowing it!

http://news.ycombinator.org/threads?id=CrabDude * enable showdead in your profile to read my comments

As you can see from my comments and contributions, most are extremely well reasoned and often entirely unique and invaluable contributions to a given conversation that to my frustration were inexplicably never upvoted or commented on, without any real insight as to why. I honestly am in shock and beyond frustrated that so much of my efforts and attempts to edify and contribute have been undermined by something that is explicitly allowed in comment guidelines. [1]

Specifically, the comment that is apparently responsible for my hellban, was on a post that linked to MY NodeKnockout entry which both won the competition category and received over 60 votes to end up on the front page:

  HEY ALL! REMEMBER TO VOTE FOR US! WE'RE TRYING TO WIN THE INNOVATION CATEGORY!
  http://nodeknockout.com/teams/starcraft-2-destroyed-my-marri...
  AND RETWEET THIS WITH #nodeko! =)

Worse, this manner of comment is explicitly mentioned as okay in the guidelines. [1]

  Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks."

And to any who would comment that my use of all caps elicited my ban, I'd respond by pointing out the use of capitalization is used "for emphasis," [2] in this case, specifically, enthusiasm -- unfortunately making the resulting ban all the more disgusting and frustrating.

To any in YC who have control over such things, please unban my account. I would greatly prefer to use it and retain all my contributions than be forced to play wack-a-mole in response to inaccurate rule enforcement.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps

[ericd]

That comment looks a LOT like spam. Hellbanning is necessary, because if a spammer realizes they've been banned overtly, they'll just create a new account and keep on spamming. You do have a lot of legitimately good comments in that list, though.

[eldude]

While I may even agree with you, the unfortunate fact is that it is not in fact spam and violates no rules or guidelines and suffers only from being overly enthusiastic in a positive and friendly manner. In truth, it is not even "empty" in that it provides an important link to the voting page.

At best this is an example of incompetence in the form of a poorly written spam detection algorithm, at worst it represents an admin's lazy disregard for the effects of "hellbanning" on a sincere community.

[burgerbrain]

"With the advent of the internet, all caps in messages became closely identified with "shouting" or attention-seeking behaviour and is considered very rude."

[eldude]

Or in this case it was simply a matter of drawing attention for any who appreciated our entry to show appreciation by helping us win. Considering this was my project, I felt obliged to bring attention to something I felt warranted it. I was neither being rude, nor would it be rude in person (as is often emphasized in the guidelines) to speak loudly in a crowded noisy room filled with people gathering to appreciate what you've built. I often host developer events, and as a host this type of behavior is not only not rude, but often necessary and appreciated. The notion that all caps are "very rude" is at best contextual. In this case, it would seem to be ignorance on the part of the admins to recognize such a purpose and intention.

However, it would appear I stand corrected as I missed the following:

"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis." [1]

However, I stand by the ridiculousness of banning a sincere contributer that's bringing traffic to the site solely due to (positive constructive) ignorance of the rules.

Would you kick a guest out from your home without warning for temporarily speaking loudly in good intention, and exclude them from all future discussions? It would seem in this case HN violates their own rule regarding civility treating people online as you would in a face to face conversation, and please don't give me the excuse of this being necessary in order to deal with spambots. Such an argument defends rudeness and laziness as a better algorithm could easily be written.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[scott_s]

Can you point to the actual posts? Every time I've seen a hellbanned account, I have agreed with the decision.

In the interest of full disclosure, my suspicion is that the way you expressed these opinions ran counter to the kind of discussion people want to see on HN. I may be wrong, of course, which is why I'd like to see the actual posts.

[zerostar07]

Not that I care anymore, but why was this account banned anyway: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ignifero ?

[eldude]

> Every time I've seen a hellbanned account, I have agreed with the decision.

I'd be curious to get your opinion on my (just discovered) ban: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475

[burgerbrain]

ALL CAPS alls warrants a ban.

That said, hellbans are fucking despicable. They might be the proper way to deal with spambots, but for contributing members they are as far as I am concerned incredibly unethical.

[mixmastamyk]

I agree. I used reddit daily for several years until a weirdo passive-agressive moderator? replied to one of my comments with profanity and then sabotaged my account in some way. Wasted a lot of time and haven't been back there for years, a shame. At least I learn more here, and there are fewer pictures of kittens.

[jcampbell1]

The fact that you consider the observation obvious, is a sign that you were possibly trolling. You were probably being intellectually too lazy to make your point without resorting using tactics like calling your own opinions seemingly obvious.

It is not obvious that increased competition leads to declining margins. Often increased competition validates the market, and increases consumer demand far more than the effect on pricing. I have seen it in my own industry, where our sales increase when a competitor launches a big ad campaign.

[anigbrowl]

I find that kind of hard to believe. I don't hack or even work in the computer industry any more, have got into arguments with almost every long-term member at some point or other, and hold distinctly minority positions on a variety of topics (most often about governance). And heaven knows that I can be as snarky or pompous as anyone else when I've had a bad day. Maybe I'm just lucky, but the admins seem pretty hands off to me.

[jcr]

anigbrowl, I enjoy your comments, both on your good days and your bad days. On rare occasions it seems like you may have misread something since your reply comes from a surprising angle, but English is not the first language of everyone, and everyone misreads things on occasion. The good news is when I see something surprising as if things were misread, it means I should reread them to make sure that I didn't misread them.

[anigbrowl]

Why thank you.

[dasil003]

> Troll is, more often than not, a term used to circle the wagons.

I think this is true by definition, after all, if the majority are trolling then it's culturally acceptable and you have 4chan.

But I think if you are being intellectually honest you need to be open to the possibility that maybe you were acting like a dick on occasion. I've dealt with heavy duty trolling before, and it's a common refrain that the admins are "fascist" and that they are simply "censoring" unpopular opinions. All the while saying things that would get their asses kicked if said in public. For the unskilled troll their behavior is obvious, but the skilled troll can make himself indistinguishable from someone who just has a mild form of digital Aspergers. Often the only goal is to piss you off and waste your time. So in the battle against trolls, detached and ruthless action is often necessary because anything else allows them to win. If there is some collateral damage because one's opinion is just too "different", probably the best thing is to move on to a different forum, or just start a blog. Then you can post your opinions and gain even more notoriety with "the regulars" possibly defending you with the backing of their mighty reputation. Witness Ted Dziuba, that cocky prick would for sure be hellbanned if he waded into HN, but he doesn't have to because everyone reads his posts directly.

[vaksel]

what does hellbanned look like on HN? Can't login? Can't post? Can post, but noone can see it?

[kstenerud]

Anything you post can't be seen by others unless they've turned on dead posts in their configuration, in which case anything you post has [dead] prefixed on it.

Though it happens less than in other forums, wagon circling is definitely a persistent problem on HN. I believe it's only further exacerbated by the fact that downvoted comments are displayed in a difficult to read color, meaning that downvotes can effectively censor things the majority doesn't like, regardless of the merit of the argument. It's not as bad as on Reddit, where groups of people form downvote cabals to actively censor specific users or ideas, but it's still problematic.

[billswift]

Interestingly, since it is easy to highlight and read them, I almost always read downvoted comments. Even in a post, like this one, with lots of comments, where I start to skim them, but I still read most of the downvoted ones.

[kstenerud]

I do too; it's just annoying to have to manually highlight something in order to read it.

In general, a 1-line downvoted post is downvoted for good reason. For multiline posts, it's far more often a good post that people didn't like for other reasons. Those are the ones I take steps to manually highlight and read, and then upvote if I think it was downvoted for the wrong reasons.

[tshtf]

You can post, but by default no one besides you can see it. To the poster, it just appears as a normal comment. Turn on "showdead" to see posts from hellbanned users.

[kaybe]

So how would I find out this has happened to me? (Besides the obvious - no answers to my comments - of course.)

[dchuk]

I had a hellbanned account before this one, and the other thing I noticed is that each page load took forever (10+ seconds) instead of the basically instantaneous loading of my current account. A very passive-aggressive way to annoy someone enough to stop posting in my opinion.

[hucker]

I can confirm that you are NOT hellbanned. One way to see if you are is logging out and see if your comment is still there. If it is not, you are banned.

[pazimzadeh]

You are not hellbanned, but you won't see this unless I'm not hellbanned.

[Cushman]

The last one. All of your comments are dead, but you don't know it.

If you have showdead on, sometimes you'll see perfectly reasonable comments that are inexplicably dead-- this is why.

[eldude]

It doesn't look like anything to the banned individual apparently, as I just now discovered that my account was banned. Awesome.

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475

[stfu]

Steven Colbert might be the best example of how good trolling can lead to very enlightening statements. In an ideal case it could even bring a self-discovery in the form of a Socratian dialogue that illustrates certain "taking things too serious" positions.

Additionally I think one should draw a line between trolling and flaming. Just some "you suck" comments are not making a troll a troll.

[tokenadult]

I'll disagree with you in part while agreeing in part. I invite onlookers to apply the rubric from pg's essay "How to Disagree"

http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

to rate how well I do in disagreeing here.

You write, Here on HN, however, as with most communities where you start to recognize the regulars (tptacek, raganwald, etc), "trolling" is redefined to simply mean "going against the grain."

I disagree with this, because I have openly disagreed at least with tptacek, and certainly with other users who have higher karma totals than I have and have been on Hacker News longer than I have, and yet I have never been hellbanned. I have seen even more open, pointed, and frequent disagreements with some of the "regulars" here from some of the other regulars, but those accounts are still alive and well. I have used the same username here, and only this one username here, during all the 1122 days since I formed my user account. To the best of my knowledge and belief, each of my posts has been visible to users since it was posted, and the majority of my comments have stayed above 0 net karma ever since they were posted.

I agree with you that expressions of opinion that disagree with the joint opinion of the most active HN participants can result in individual net downvotes of comments. Before I got here, it was declared that the site founder is okay with participants downvoting to express disagreement with comments,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

and when I lose karma on a net basis with a particular comment, I look at how the comment was written, and think about how I could make a comment that disagrees with prevailing opinion be more persuasive the next time. (Another user who has replied to you reports experiments in doing this, and I will look at the examples found in the past comments by that user to see how it is done.) Once in a while, if an issue is important enough to me, I'll openly (and, I hope, respectfully and thoughtfully) disagree, and figure that such occasions when I burn through karma is what karma is worth accumulating for.

To sum up, I agree with the proposition that some comments here are downvoted solely to express disagreement. The art of writing comments is to figure out how to express disagreement and still appeal to disagreeing readers as a thoughtful participant in intellectual discussion. On the other hand, I don't think most users here flag comments for disagreement, but rather for blatant violation of the site guidelines. I disagree with the proposition that anyone has been hellbanned solely for posting comments that are in factual disagreement with majority opinion here. I see plenty of live accounts that manage to openly express disagreement frequently, and I possess one.

AFTER EDIT: I note, entirely with amusement, that this comment is bouncing up and down in karma score just now. Whatever, I'm just trying to point to some reasons to think about the issue differently from the opinion expressed in the parent comment. Whether you the reader agree or not is up to you.

AFTER FURTHER EDIT, RELATING TO COMMENT REPLYING TO THIS COMMENT: Thank you for your reply. I agree that it is logically correct to say that pointing to accounts that survive despite disagreement is not an airtight proof that no accounts have been hellbanned for disagreement. On the other hand, my general point is that I don't see any affirmative evidence for the extraordinary claim that this site is moderated with swift and frequent hellbanning for disagreement as a routine part of the moderation policy. I join the other users who have already said, "link, please?" to follow up statements of the nature of "In each case nothing I'd ever said would be considered trolling by any rational observer," so that we can all see just what the problem was. I had showdead on for most of 2010 and 2011, and I never felt, as I read dead posts, that users who don't see dead posts are missing much from the thousands of posts here on Hacker News. The way to get a reality check on this statement, of course, is to turn on showdead and see what dead posts look like day after day after day on a variety of subjects in a variety of threads.

[tshtf]

I disagree with the proposition that anyone has been hellbanned solely for posting comments that are in factual disagreement with majority opinion here. I see plenty of live accounts that manage to openly express disagreement frequently, and I possess one.

This is a logical fallacy. Simply because there exist an account that hasn't been hellbanned because they express disagreement doesn't mean that other accounts aren't hellbanned for expressing disagreement.

[tptacek]

There is zero chance yelling at or about me on HN is going to get you hellbanned. There's a bigger chance I'll get hellbanned.

This is one of the dumber meta-threads HN has had. Not so much your comment in particular as the whole thing.

[tshtf]

You won't be shitbanned, tptacek. Someone with 100 karma who makes a contrary post for a YC company will.

[blasdel]

A couple years ago a prominent user with ~9000 karma was hellbanned for getting picked on by Zed Shaw, and pg went as far as adding new code to news.arc afterward so he wouldn't show up on the "leaders" list anymore (he was unbanned a month ago).

You'd be surprised, it doesn't take much to get pg trigger-happy. He's threatened me with banning a few times myself!

[philwelch]

It would be helpful if you provided links to your previous accounts, so we could see for ourselves.