[dmorgan]

Yes, because "free speech" is nice and all, but there are some opinions that you should not have, even on a liberal place like Hacker News.

One should not be allowed to divert from popular opinion (be it popular in society in general, in some conservative circle, or merely popular within the hip crowd), even if he is not being trollish and is providing arguments about it.

In issues where most HN people agree, you should not dissent, because we have already reached the absolute enlightenment and correct opinion on things such as "sexism". No need for discussion or argumentation any more on this front, except to agree with each other.

I propose we call those "hell-banning" provoking arguments, "thought crimes".

Which reminds me of the 3rd most popular article on HN today:

"Free speech is dying in the Western world. While most people still enjoy considerable freedom of expression, this right, once a near-absolute, has become less defined and less dependable for those espousing controversial social, political or religious views. The decline of free speech has come not from any single blow but rather from thousands of paper cuts of well-intentioned exceptions designed to maintain social harmony."

[nemo]

I hadn't communicated with uriel on Hacker News, so perhaps he had better behavior here, but part of the reason I avoided him was because of interactions with him on reddit. He was a really bright guy, and when discussing software he had a lot of valuable insight, but religion and politics got him behaving in ways that were destructive to communities. On reddit he would get belligerent to the point of being verbally abusive. Not just rude, but creepily vindictive and stalking. I can't say that that's why he got hell-banned here, but given how he acted elsewhere on the web, it may well be that he was banned over issues more serious than merely airing unpopular opinions.

[astrobe_]

Last time I checked, a significant part of the posters on suckess.org mailing list(s) have quite an aggressive communication style. People lurking on these mailing lists can eventually get over it, and eventually exchange interesting arguments between the flames; but it's clearly fully counter-productive outside of that place.

[wisty]

Hellbanning is necessary to keep the trolls out. The problem is, HN's hellbans are really clunky, especially given how pg practically invented spam filters. You'd think there'd be some kind of bayesian predictor on whether a poster is a troll, and modding them troll would simply increase the probability that their posts would be DOAd.

[tripzilch]

> Hellbanning is necessary to keep the trolls out.

No it is NOT.

You do understand what hellbanning is, right? It means hiding their posts from everyone but them. That's right, if you were hellbanned, you wouldn't know.

Read this:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...

Hellbanning, as opposed to regular banning, a warning system or suspensions, is counterproductive, a giant waste of people's time and frankly condescending towards the userbase.

There is nothing that hellbanning (the way it's doled out on HN) solves better than regular bans, suspensions or warnings. And there are a whole lot of things it makes worse.

To me the concept of hellbanning always seemed like a real nasty practical joke, something you'd specifically code as a one-off to temporarily trick your worst, most persistent long-time troll.

As you use it as a punishment method on everyone, it becomes less effective on actual trolls (compared to regular bans), because a determined troll knows its environment, and knows to occasionally check their account via other means to see if it's been hellbanned. So for that troll, a hellban differs none from a regular ban.

Regular users, however, since the mods are not infallible (instead, on HN they are for some ill-thought-out reason invisible and unaccountable), sometimes also get caught in this. Sometimes for little reasons, sometimes they did earn some punishment for ill intentions.

However when these are not full-time trolls, it becomes really sad to see how it wastes a lot of smart people's time. They can't see they're hellbanned, I've seen some of the poor sods keep on writing comments (that people who did not switch on "show dead" cannot see) for over a year. Some of those comments are really thoughtful, as well.

When I see such a case, I browse back in their comment history to see what infraction caused their hellban. Often I have to guess, what is their most downvoted comment from just before the time their comments turn grey. As I said, unaccountable. Yes it's usually something very stupid, something that deserves all the downvotes it can get, perhaps some of it might warrant a regular ban,

but I have NEVER seen ANY hellbanned user saying something so utterly reprehensible that it would warrant wasting someone's time for over a year that they spent writing comments on HN.

The other problem is, it doesn't even notify them that they did something wrong! It's not even a slap on the wrist, they don't notice! It's just stupid.

And in the mean time, a determined troll occasionally checks if they can still see their account's comments via a proxy, and if they cannot, they simply register a new account, just as if they were banned via a regular ban.

[eternalban]

> It's just stupid.

Borderline unethical. It is an explicit and willfully applied passive-aggressive mechanism of dubious utility in response to 'perceived' attempts at trolling a forum.

Keep in mind the mechanism is designed to have a negative psychological impact on the subject and comes with a later date "haha" surprise date. I find it vile.

(Fully agree re. the waste of time, too.)

[0wza]

The parent's term "passive-aggressive" is spot on.

StackExchange is even worse.

If you only knew their banning practices. They have extremely thin skin. The anti-thesis of "Postal's Law".

When they ban, it's not a warning, it's permanent. One mistake and you are banned for infinity.

"Trolls" (a very subjective term) will never learn to behave as you want them to if you don't steer them toward better behavior. Banning them in knee-jerk like fashion does not steer them toward being better netizens or being more agreeable to your views.

If the thinking is "my forum, my rules" then when the rules become silly (and they often do), we need more forums, run by more reasonable people. This is nothing new. "Postal's Law" is one of those insightful ideas that has greater applicability than was intended (e.g., more than just the structure of packets) and it will continue to seem ahead of it's time, as censorship keeps rearing its ugly head.

[philh]

> There is nothing that hellbanning (the way it's doled out on HN) solves better than regular bans, suspensions or warnings.

Sure there is: griefers.

The problem is that hellbanning is the only kind of discipline, and it gets handed out too easily. And you're (probably) right that this in turn makes it less effective against griefers than it could be. But it's still more effective than a regular ban.

[tripzilch]

Sorry I'm only familiar with the concept of griefers in online gaming. How does the phenomenon manifest on HN?

[potatolicious]

Griefer is just a troll - or perhaps a more extreme troll, one that will go substantially out of their way to evade a ban and continue being an asshole.

A hellban has its utility, but it cannot be the only method for censuring abusive users. It needs to only be applied in cases where the user is likely to try and continue to antagonize the community by dodging a regular ban, and sparingly.

The problem with hellbanning on HN is that everyone knows it's going on, and it's become such a big deal that it greatly reduces its effectiveness. As you said, if a troll suspects they're being hellbanned, they can easily just sign up for another account.

I'm of the opinion that hellbans are way too common on HN where in almost all cases a regular old suspension/ban would have sufficed.

[CamperBob2]

Indeed... a few minutes after you turn on showdead you'll see that hellbanning is not used primarily for troll control. Trolls are people who post goatse links or overtly inflammatory opinions that they clearly don't even hold.

Instead, hellbanning on HN is used on people who disagree with someone who has the power to do something about it. It's used to dismiss people who stray outside the hive and fail to toe the party line... a party line that isn't even written down anywhere.

It's lame, and IMHO pg needs to reign in some of the more obvious moderation abuses.

[egypturnash]

Shit, I didn't know it was going on here until this thread.

[chc]

>> Hellbanning is necessary to keep the trolls out.

> No it is NOT.

> You do understand what hellbanning is, right? It means hiding their posts from everyone but them. That's right, if you were hellbanned, you wouldn't know.

That is why it's the only effective measure against trolls. If you ban a troll the old-fashioned way, they can just make a new account. Hellbanning prevents or at least greatly delays this in most cases, making it a more effective countermeasure than pretty much anything else we can practically implement.

[Evgeny]

I've seen some of the poor sods keep on writing comments (that people who did not switch on "show dead" cannot see) for over a year.

I switched on "show dead" and immediately came across a guy who seems to be hellbanned 463 days ago and still is posting ... now I feel heartbroken. I can only imagine what he would feel ...

[fusiongyro]

Free speech is something the government guarantees its citizens. It's not something every website on the internet owes you.

[davidp]

Your second sentence is true: Private censorship isn't the same as public censorship; you have no fundamental right to free speech in a context owned by someone else (private website, physical business, physical home, etc.).

But your first sentence needs adjustment: Free speech is something a government takes away from its citizens. It's a fundamental right held by everyone in the world. There are governments that fail to protect it, and of course many that actively violate it.

[JasonFruit]

It irrationally aggravates me when people say this, but: This. Rights are inherent to people, not something granted to them by the whim of people with power.

[Udo]

You are correct. However, these days significant portions of our communications are carried, curated, and distributed only through corporations - to the point where many people rightly feel those corporations have at least as much effect on our life as the government, without being held to the same standards of course. Expecting only governments to honor rights such as free speech does feel a little anachronistic in a world that's increasingly controlled by powerful economic interests. Restricting the obligation to honor human rights to governments is starting to look like a giant loophole, a legislative bug emerging from a legacy system.

Though I do not share these concerns as far as message board moderation is concerned, I believe there is often a good reason why people tend to invoke free speech instinctively in these cases. The expectation is that basic rights are not so much special allowances patronizingly handed down from the government intended for an increasingly narrow context but should instead be understood as innate personhood rights enabling people to live a free and dignified life.

[patrocles]

Yay. We label Uriel a troll and not Pando Daily or any other daily controversy generators.

[hindsightbias]

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html