[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.

[0wza]

If people like luriel are consistently being hellbanned for speaking their mind on some non-programming topic, I still want to read what they're saying about programming.

Everyone has some controversial viewpoints on _some_ topic. But that's not the point. I really don't care what programmers think about politics, religion, sexism or topics not related to computing. This guy had a refined taste for programming. Aesthetics. Plan 9, cat -v, suckless, Go. Not perfection, but sooooo much better than so much else.

The idea of hellbanning people who can actually think outside the box is troubling. Send them to some isolated, limited audience forum ("hell"?) if you wish. Just tell us where it is if we want to read it. Because I certainly do.

[chc]

Amy Hoy and Thomas Ptacek strongly disagree with both the majority here and Paul Graham himself all the time, yet they aren't hellbanned. It's not just "straying outside the hive" or "failing to toe the party line" — much of the time, it's expressing offensive opinions (e.g. "women are inferior"), trying to shove your opinion down people's throats to the detriment of the site overall (e.g. losethos' weird Christian ramblings), or just being very rude about your unpopular opinion (e.g. "Apple is going to fail but you don't see it because you are Tim Cook's gay lover"). You might wish for people to be able to belligerently proclaim any offensive opinion they might hold, but this isn't your site or mine, and PG is within his rights doing what he thinks is necessary to keep the conversation quality at a high level.

This is not to say that the system is perfect. Many people get banned wrongly, and I think uriel was one of those. I do think a warning system would be better in many cases. But it seems to me that most hellbans are handed out to people who are indeed simply jerks.

[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 ...