[lkozma]

jacko0 and ksrm [EDIT: and icecreampain], you seem to be under some kind of ban - what you write appears gray, and is invisible when I log out - despite them appearing to be perfectly valid contributions.

I really hate this whole banning on HN - the fact that people get banned and continue posting without knowing it (sometimes for months) - seems to me like the elementary school bullying technique of putting a post-it on someone's back and letting them walk around with it.

[ksrm]

Thank you for letting me know, I have no idea why that has happened. Apart from me describing someone's idea of Clojure as the next-gen Lisp as 'cute', which was maybe a bit rude, I don't think I've done anything to deserve being banned. I was never a fan of this hellbanning idea and now it seems I've become a victim of it. What do I do now?

[lifeisstillgood]

[e-mail] I think - gets you through to a shared mailbox and someone will reply

However your comments seem fine from where I'm standing - possibly someone mistook 0 points for banned/dead?

And yes - loving seeing parts of London I know so well.

[lkozma]

I also thought it might have been just 0 points, but his other comment in the thread still appears as [dead] for me. jacko0's comment now appears as normal, although earlier I clearly remember it was [dead]. icecreampain's still appears as [dead]. Anyway, it could be some glitch in the software, but the system is a bit strange anyway.

[lifeisstillgood]

a bit strange anyway is the best description I can muster too. however it does not send me emails nor try to get my kids to buy upgrades of dubious worth. so on balance it beats out most other things on an iPhone :-)

(sorry very annoyed by kids games that chuck in upgrades and unlocks fr cash - really really unacceptable)

[lhl]

While I'm ok w/ the general principle of hellbanning (done properly, it can be a very effective way of tarpitting trolls/spammers) I don't think HN's implementation is very good.

New accounts start w/ 0 karma and posts seem to go dead when you go negative, so it's pretty common for perfectly normal accounts to be hellbanned just because of one or two initial downvotes.

It'd be pretty trivial to improve the algorithm, the most simple being a karma buffer (a purposely bad actor is sure to accrue plenty of downvotes) or some new account/unique post discounts/allowances. You can of course go pretty deep down the rabbit hole once you start with these things, but I bet even the simplest fix would solve most of these problems.

[Udo]

I tried looking into what got them banned, but it's not at all obvious from their history. I wonder what happened here?