[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.

[tptacek]

The hellbanning "system" is causing more trouble that it's solving. It needs to go.

[chc]

I think you're also conflating the practice of hellbanning with the system that HN currently implements, where people are hellbanned when a warning or time-out would be much more appropriate. They're two different things. Hellbanning is an effective deterrent, but of course any deterrent will be problematic when applied to the wrong people.

[tptacek]

I've started making an effort to reach out to people who are obviously hellbanned and who subsequently make substantive comments; I think other people should do it too. A sibling comment next to [dead] ones might suffice, if we can make sure we only get one of those comments in each thread.

I don't personalize it or "blame" Graham for it; I understand why he started the practice. But he should stop now.

[potatolicious]

Right, which brings to question why hellban jerks instead of just regular-banning them.

Hellbans are designed to be undetected by the banned party, to prevent them from reating a cat and mouse situation where site operators constantly fight to keep the banned off the site (new accounts, new IPs, etc).

Very few of the people who are being banned from the site appear to be trolls - if they're just jerks, do they not deserve to be told that they are no longer welcome

Instead we've simply silenced these people without the courtesy of even telling them, and for what?

[chc]

As you just said, it's to prevent the whack-a-mole game of impotently banning an endless stream of new accounts. Being a jerk is strongly correlated with not respecting bans — if they cared about your wishes in the first place, they wouldn't have acted so inconsiderate. If you ban a jerk, they make a new account and keep at it. If you hellban them, they tend to stay that way for a good long while.

I do think there should be a lesser level of punishment for people who aren't that incorrigible, but hellbanning jerks definitely has its place. It is the most effective countermeasure available.

[potatolicious]

> "Being a jerk is strongly correlated with not respecting bans"

Big citation needed on this. If anything, look at the namesake of this post - this is a guy who was banned for inflammatory views, but there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it, and no indication that he would've become the incessant ban-dodger had he known he was banned.

I don't think the link between espousing inflammatory views and waging a troll-war on a community is really that obvious.

> "It is the most effective countermeasure available."

In the same way a nuclear missile is the most effective countermeasure available against annoying neighbors. Technically true, but complete and utter overkill. The problem here is that on HN so many people have been hellbanned, with such regularity, who show no inclination towards being a troll, that there is a site-wide consciousness for this sort of thing, making the hellban itself less effective. You need to reserve your strongest tools for the cases that truly demand it - popping off the internet forum equivalent of a nuclear missile at every turn simply makes it less effective when you do need it.

[chc]

> Big citation needed on this.

Eh, honestly, just experience. I've served as moderator at a number of forums in my days and talked to moderators of other forums. If someone actually respected a permaban, it was a strong indicator that they weren't so bad after all, because the real jerks would just make a new account and continue. The defining quality of a jerk is that he doesn't care about other people's wishes, and that includes your wish that he go elsewhere.

> If anything, look at the namesake of this post - this is a guy who was banned for inflammatory views, but there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it, and no indication that he would've become the incessant ban-dodger had he known he was banned.

And sure enough, I have already said many times now that I didn't think he was a good candiate for a hellban. Just because I think hellbans are a good tool doesn't mean I think everybody should be hellbanned. However, I will address one point that I think gets more to the heart of the issue:

> there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it

It doesn't really matter if somebody is trolling or just an inconsiderate jerk. From the point of view of having a healthy community, I don't care why somebody is radioactively toxic — I just care that they stop doing it.

The reason Uriel was a bad hellban is that he wasn't incorrigibly toxic. But many people are just jerks, with 60% of their posts being pure nastiness, and they do need to go, and hellbans are the best way to accomplish it.

[philh]

> there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it, and no indication that he would've become the incessant ban-dodger had he known he was banned.

Point of order: he did discover he was banned, and he did dodge it.

(I have no problem with this, because he shouldn't have been banned, and because we long ago reached the point where it's perfectly reasonable for a user to trust their own judgement over that of a moderator.)

[TheAmazingIdiot]

Why not discuss topics of ethics like "women are inferior"?

If these conclusions are oh so horribly wrong, then bringing them out 'in the sun' should make them self evident they are not true. And beyond that, people who make claims such as that usually have false premises in which that and other statements of fact are also just as incorrect.

The statement about people who baselessly insult (Mac-fag and ilk) we can do without in a community.

[chc]

> Why not discuss topics of ethics like "women are inferior"?

> If these conclusions are oh so horribly wrong, then bringing them out 'in the sun' should make them self evident they are not true.

You might think that, but in practice they're just shouting matches that accomplish nothing but offense. Those discussions will not convince people who are committed to their views (who are the ones most likely to start a "women are inferior"-type thread), but they will drag down the quality of conversation and lead to (for example) more overall sexist speech on Hacker News. Even if you did convince someone (which you won't 99% of the time), there's an endless supply of other jerks to keep dragging the conversation down if you let them.

There are places to talk about absolutely anything that's on your mind in whatever manner you feel like. This isn't one of them. Hacker News has standards. Not every place has to be a perfect bastion of unfettered free speech. You'll also not get to stay in my apartment very long if you call my girlfriend a prostitute, even though that is also easily disproven.

[TheAmazingIdiot]

Perhaps you're right. There are some topics best left for others to 'discuss'. For example, common topics like Nazis, Jews, Islam, abortion, inferior women, blacks.

However, these were not topics I had in mind for ethics or such. We deal with in this community the ethics and morality of business and commerce. Along side, we deal with programmers who can do great good or great harm. These are more controversial topics I think about.

  DRM
  (RI/MP)AA
  governments (US and others)
  Immigration 
  piracy
  filesharing technology
  bitcoin
  laws intersecting commerce (AirBNB, UBER)

I think you're right. In cases of people acting like a 'shitcock', doing _something_ seems rational to keep the community in check. But stopping people who only want to interrupt the community is much different than those that take hard stances elsewhere.

As an example, I use GNU extensively and am a communist (used in sense of economic policy). I also have no issue in using pirated anything. That right there probably goes against 99% of the companies present.

[JabavuAdams]

It's a question of venue and audience. I don't want to have to discuss whether or not black are inferior every time I go to my local hangout to get a coffee.

I may choose to, and have chosen to debate whether or not blacks are inferior, but it's stressful and annoying. It's something better reserved for a certain frame of mind and known venue.

So, I assume that given some threshold of are-women-inferior discussions, many interesting women just stop showing up at your party. It's natural that certain topics are more sensitive (especially to people placed on the defensive), and that you don't just drop them like bombs in an unrelated conversation / venue.