[jfriedly]

An example:

First alpha release of Python 3.4 is out (python.org)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155423

It probably linked to [1], but all we can tell is that it was something at python.org. The post was by plessthanpt05, an HN user for about two years with 838 karma. All of his/her posts from the past year or so are dead (about 60 of them). They don't appear to be a bot.

Python 3.4.0a1 isn't something that would interest everyone on HN, but it certainly doesn't seem like the kind of thing that should have been killed.

[1] http://python.org/download/releases/3.4.0/

Edit: more details on plessthanpt05

[bnr]

Well, that user also posted over 60 links in the last year, while never receiving a single upvote or comment. I'm not sure why a flesh-and-blood user would still be posting after that.

[consz]

I posted here for a year after getting hellbanned before realizing. It happens.

[kefka]

On another account, I checked regularly for possible hellban status.

Lo and behold, I caught it about 3 days in. Of course, I didn't even use HN for the first of those 2 days.

This day, I spend more of my time on subreddits that share HN's enthusiasm and knowledge without the subterfuge of hellbans.

[Phlarp]

Could you elaborate on which subs these are?

[Too]

Maybe hellbanning adds random upvotes to deceive the poster even further?

[ics]

"Saved links" might be one reason. While I wouldn't advocate using HN as a personal bookmark service it does lessen the burn a bit if nobody else comments/votes on it. The good thing is that if you use saved links for that it makes you think twice about what sort of things you should be submitting.

[jfriedly]

Their posting frequency dropped significantly over the past year, probably as a result of never receiving any upvotes. At the time they were (presumably) hellbanned, they were posting at a rough average of one post per day, and it's much less frequent now. They seem to go for a week or two period in which they'll post several links, then forget about HN for a while.

I won't try to defend all of their posts; most of them are things that I don't even find interesting. But it seems that someone basically used banning as a method of cutting down on uninteresting material.

That may even be a good way of maintaining the signal-to-noise ratio on HN: if we ban the users that post many uninteresting links then the community won't have to see them. But it wasn't a tactic that I was aware of before today.

[jfriedly]

I can't seem to edit this now, but someone else reposted the link to Python 3.4.0a1:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155530

Their submission currently has 34 upvotes.