[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.