
Suspension, Ban or Hellban? - vijaydev
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-hellban.html
======
ck2
BTW, HN has a hybrid hellban+slowban in case some still don't know.

Not only do you become invisible to others but there is long sleep delay on
pages.

My old "_ck_" account somehow got flagged that way for reasons I don't
understand and cannot find anyone to undo ( _and still would please like it
back if possible?_ )

~~~
swombat
It has hellbanning, and, apart from, obviously, pg, I don't know a single
person who thinks it's a good idea. Since I have showdead on I've seen
numerous comments by people who have been hellbanned for years and still don't
realise. The really horrible thing is, most of their comments are perfectly
legit - sometimes all of their comments.

I remember reading a science fiction story where the punishment for certain
crimes was that you got a special tag which meant that everyone would simply
ignore you and refuse to acknowledge your existence, for a year. You became
"invisible". Other "invisible" people also had to ignore you, iirc, otherwise
their sentence would be extended. It was painted quite vividly as an extremely
cruel form of punishment.

Personally, I find it extremely distasteful, for the sake of not dealing with
people complaining about being banned, to simply make them invisible.

~~~
philwelch
Whenever I've turned on showdead, the only hellbanned comments I've seen were
either patent nonsense or worse. Sometimes it was a user that alternates
between legitimate comments and patent nonsense. Do you have an example to
share?

~~~
derleth
If I may toot my own horn, I submit my old account, chbarts, for your
consideration.

~~~
philwelch
Fair enough. You were a bit of an asshole around the time you were hellbanned,
but you had a fair number of decent contributions afterwards.

------
prodigal_erik
It's worth noting that the author's non-transparent heavy-handedness towards
"niceness" in meta has driven away at least one of the self-governing, power-
to-the-people moderators he advocates.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2473029>

I'm disturbed by the idea that concealment is considered an appropriate
response to social problems you don't know how to solve (I'm aware pg does it
also).

~~~
codinghorror
Just to clarify, all that was over a single removed unconstructive comment
(not a question or answer) _on a meta_. Literally. Does it get more trivial
than that? The topic of the blog post was about removal of users from the main
site, which is a far more serious matter.

~~~
shaggyfrog
I think it's up to Dr. Clark to decide how "trivial" a matter it is to see his
words unilaterally scrubbed, as if they never existed.

And as far as the meta sites go, I've found meta.SO to be an echo chamber;
ideas aren't voted up or down so much on how they contribute to the discussion
(as it goes on HN), but on whether or not how much the cool clique agrees.

------
jrspruitt
My first reaction was this is terrible, just giving someone the silent
treatment, does nothing to clue them into what they did to deserve it.
Assuming they are not a troll, who know what they're doing is wrong, the
person may not understand, what they are doing is not acceptable, perhaps a
cultural difference, perhaps social issues they have, ignorance whatever.
Giving them the silent treatment will do nothing, they already have issues
with socializing obviously, "getting the hint" probably isn't their strong
point.

Then I started thinking about what was said, about this being "reality
altering". Which I disagree with, if you are not good at socializing, annoying
even, no one is going to want you to be involved in conversations, or
participate in activities with you. Much like ratings/web hits, if people
don't like you or what you have to say, you effectively get the silent
treatment, or are completely ignored or worse. If you do have relevant things
to say, and are socially well behaved, people aren't going to ignore you, and
will want you to participate in their activities, because you have something
to offer, and its in their best interest to let you participate. That is of
course assuming they don't have some prior misconception about you, because of
race, sex, jealously or other social failures on their own parts. They will
accept you in instead of doing all those things that they do to try and give
you the hint to "go away" like ignoring you, not telling you about social
gatherings, or whatever. This is all very natural, and mimics the real world
quite well.

------
Xurinos
I have considered the "hellban" in the past for supertrolls on the Dark Mists
forums, but I think our players are not so easily duped, and it could lead to
worse fires to put out. The problem is that they do not just have one account
on the forum, and they do not participate in isolation from other players;
people talk to each other.

"Did you see my post where I told off Xurinos? No? Censorship! Big brother!
I'll make another account and spam it."

In other words, hellbanning is not really different from obvious bans. And
frankly, players will communicate via AIM outside of the forum anyway.

It is a lot more difficult, but there are ways that moderators can work with a
community to establish the social rules and expectations, such that the entire
community is in support of putting down the trolls. And the easiest way to
drop a troll is to ignore them, to not validate them. After years of trying
different techniques in DM, this has been the most effective.

On occasion, we still ban or delete posts, but we make the reasons clear and
consistent with the ethics of the community. There is always some kind of
drama of the month. Most of the time, we can just move on to doing more
important/fun things like _playing the game_.

One addition to this: The players understand that if we had to ban them on the
forum, they also have their character (associated with that account) banned.
So banning is a bit more painful then a simple rejection from public
communication and has to be done with due care.

------
ph0rque
Interesting... what about a progressive hellban, where there's a probability
that the hellbanned user's participation is seen by others? The probability
would exponentially decay after each offense and be slowly restored as a
function of time without offense.

~~~
antihero
That could just lead to fragmented conversations that serve to further confuse
the average user.

~~~
d2zo
What if replies to a progressively hellbanned user were themselves affected by
the ban (tainted)? That would address the fragmentation.

~~~
Zakharov
It would also result in a lot of good content written by respected community
members being hidden.

------
skybrian
I wonder if anyone has tried slowing down some posts - sort of like a
"hellban," except that the user's comments do show up for others after a few
hours, making back-and-forth arguments less likely.

~~~
dtwwtd
I think this would be an interesting twist on the "slowban" from the article.
It would certainly impede argumentative behavior.

------
justin_vanw
Power without transparency inevitably leads to power that is abused. In the
west we have built our civil systems around that theory.

What are we risking by not having this transparency on HN? By not having
transparency on what accounts are banned, and why? Only the value of the
discourse that occurs here.

If the value of the communications that happen here is high enough, our
interest in having protections for that communication should be just as high.

If the value of this discourse is low, why are we putting on airs and
pretending we need harsh measures, such as slowbanning, to protect it?

Sooner or later, any human, even one as benevolent as pg, will abuse their
power over others. We need access to the reasons that accounts are secretly
banned or slowbanned, so that we can pressure moderators (or whoever has that
power) to wield the punishments fairly, and petition for unfair punishments to
be reversed.

~~~
Zakharov
"Power without transparency inevitably leads to power that is abused" is true
only for some value of "inevitably". You can have a benevolent dictator; you
can't have three consecutive benevolent dictators. So long as we don't expect
HN to outlive pg, we don't need to be all that concerned about serious abuse.
The question is whether the cost of potential abuse is greater than the cost
of trolls being able to create new accounts when they get banned.

~~~
brudgers
> _"You can have a benevolent dictator"_

Or in the case of HN a philosopher king.

------
crikli
I'd never even heard of this practice, hellbanning, slowbanning. I gotta say,
and this may not be popular sentiment, that I view using such tactics as
dishonest. You got a problem with someone, deal with it head-on. Don't resort
to passive-aggressiveness, and don't yield to the oh-so-human desire for
revenge the delicious poison of helping someone get what you feel they have
coming to them.

Deal with problem users directly and honestly. Warn them, temp-ban them if it
doesn't work, permaban them if they force you to, but not without telling them
why.

I'm not speaking without experience. I've been the moderator of political
threads in the off-topic section of a college football board for about six
years. We've had to deal with some crazies.

~~~
metajack
It turns out that if you ban a certain set of users they will react strongly,
often causing many more problems. At Chesspark I was just amazed at the
lengths people would go to to get revenge for some perceived wrong when they
got reprimanded for violating community standards.

Making them think nothing happened but removing them from the rest of the site
is extremely effective.

Blackholing IPs is a poor solution in practice, since many users can change
IPs on a whim, and some ISPs run DHCP out of large subnets that may contain
respectable users.

------
davidst
I'm not sure how I feel about this suggestion but it seems worth pondering: If
you have an advertising-supported site and advertising is what is supporting
the community then it seems reasonable to show more or less advertising based
on the contribution of individual members of the community.

The most valuable contributors would see little (or possibly no) advertising
in exchange for the value they are contributing with their time. People who
are disruptive have a cost and the compensation for that would be to gradually
increase the level of advertising shown to them.

Clearly, this isn't perfect, but no system is and there is at least a
rationale for it.

~~~
andrewpi
I think Slashdot allows high karma users to disable advertising actually.

------
Tycho
The problem with this democratic moderation is... it's a bit self-affirming
and oblivious to its hidden costs. For instance the moderators on
Programmers.stackExchange constantly close topics for any reason they can
find, even if it was interesting reading and people were providing answers.
Not to mention a lot of the topics which are 'legit' are much _less_
interesting. Result? Puts people off, site gets gradually more boring, but
they think everything's going great.

------
DanielBMarkham
I'm a guest, so I like listening in (and participating at times) to the
community. As a guest, it's a privilege to be here.

But I have a very simple rule about websites: the site should do things that I
naturally expect. If I provide a credit card, I don't expect that credit card
to be used for other purchases. If I provide an email, I don't expect to be
spammed. If I cancel a membership, I don't expect to be able to access the
site.

And if I provide a comment that appears to be legit, I expect other people to
be able to read it. When I vote something up, I expect that vote to make a
difference. In short, if you provide what appears to be a way of communicating
with others, it had damn well be a way of communicating.

When website owners violate that standard of fairness, sorry to say, I find it
unethical. They are presenting me with a picture of the world that they know
not to be true. Not as bad as using my credit card to make other purchases,
but bad.

The "needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" argument is
fundamentally flawed. It's the obnoxious protester who turns out to be right
every now and then. It's the guy pleading for an unpopular cause that manages
to sway public opinion. In short, we desperately need diversity of opinion and
manners.

What happens is, people change and sites no longer serve them. Whatever the
_intent_ of the "feature", the effect seems to be preventing folks from
changing. To enforce group homogeneity.

Like I said, I'm happy to be here and follow whatever rules there are. But
this hellbanning shit is way fucked up. I don't care how many millions of
users you have, screwing over folks for the greater good -- and lying to their
face about it -- isn't a good thing at all.

How many hours of people's lives do you get to rob them of, pretending to let
them publicly comment, before it's a bad thing? 10? 100? 1000? If a thousand
people were actively commenting and nobody could read them, where do they go
to get that part of their life back? Who says it's okay to lie like that? Just
because you are a guest in somebody's house, they should treat you this way? I
don't think so.

We act as if people are simply cogs in some great machine, the machine of the
site. Not precious humans.

My opinion, for what it's worth. A bit over the top and theatrical, sure, but
I exaggerate to make a point. Hopefully folks are able to read and understand
it. There's no bright line between "I hellbanned this guy for being that .01%
of folks who are impossible to deal with" and "I didn't like Joe, so let's
just let him think he's contributing" You start down this road, there is no
turning off. It's either acceptable or not. To me it's not.

These are tough problems, yes. But simply because you have something that
works doesn't mean that it is the right thing to do. EDIT: Note slowbanning is
fine. Nobody says you have to have a _responsive_ site, just an honest one.

~~~
joshu
Unfortunately, banning abusive or spamming users is basically providing
feedback that they have been caught. So allowing them to continue expending
effort instead of just creating a new account that will also have to be caught
and banned creates a more difficult terrain for the abuser.

"hellbanning" in my mind, though, ought typically be applied to automated
spammers and other miscreants, not actual humans with opinions, etc.

~~~
alphakappa
Automated spammers wouldn't care if their input was ignored or not.
Hellbanning would have a good chance of working only with real humans
(miscreants included)

~~~
pseudonym
The point of hellbanning is keeping the spam coming from one username or IP,
and then not displaying it. If you throw a "You have been banned" message back
to a bot, then eventually a human is going to read it, make note of it, and
recreate the account or connect from a different IP.

------
eggbrain
This topic reminds me somewhat of DRM -- Specifically, #2 and #3 reminds me of
Titan Quest's blocks that caused pirated copies of the game to malfunction and
crash without warning.

The problem is, many believe this actually backfired for Titan Quest: people
reviewed the game and said it was buggy and would crash often, so people
didn't buy the game, even when these bugs only affected the pirates.

Couldn't this happen too, with websites that are trying to rise in popularity?
If you have users that are getting slowbanned or errorbanned, they will move
away from your site. They might also tell other users that your site is slow
and glitchy, and to stay away as well. In the end, this could very well hurt
your site more than it is helping it.

And also, what about legitimate users? If a user ever gets a 404, a slow
loading page, or no one responding to their queries, they will wonder if
they've been hit by a ban. Do you want legitimate users (the majority) to have
to worry about something that effects only a small amount of problem users?

~~~
recoiledsnake
% of game pirates >> % of hellbanned users

------
huhtenberg
Another more traditional name for _hellban_ is _shadow ban_. Just saying, for
those who remember the modems and BBSes :)

------
Lucadg
Other users should simply stop answering to the bad guys. It works like
hellbanning but it's more acceptable. I have seen this working in some of my
forums. Trouble is "legitimate" users have a bad habit of keeping the
conversation alive, so they are responsible too. Ignore the bad guys and they
leave, answer to them and accept the consequences.

~~~
thenduks
That's exactly what hellbanning does. It enforces the no-feeding-the-trolls
rule. You _can't_ keep a conversation alive with a troll if the troll is
hellbanned. The site ignores them for you.

~~~
Lucadg
yes but hellbanned guy does not know it, which makes it completely different.
The "government" is not acting transparently here, so it's not democratic.
Anyway, my proposition is not applicable to most situations, it's just an
ideal one.

------
antihero
#2 and #3...every reddit user just became paranoid.

------
ballard
The stackoverflow model seems very similar to the successful models of
european prison reform systems: gradually reward inmates with many incremental
levels of privileges for good behavior and dial back otherwise.

------
jleader
One drawback to the various forms of invisible bans is that they aren't
visible to the rest of the community. The HN "showdead" feature allows the
banned comments to be seen, but relatively few people (I assume) use that
feature.

One good way for community members to learn what is or isn't acceptable is by
example.

Approaches like disemvoweling (and like HN's graying of down-voted comments)
have the advantage that the offending post is still available as an example to
other members of the community, quite clearly saying "don't be like this".

Another distinction is that disemvoweling is an action taken against comments,
not users. Ideally, a user's first offensive post is disemvoweled, but they're
allowed to come back and make a second attempt at civil conversation.

Of course, you still need a way to deal with the persistent offenders who
refuse to learn from their experiences. For them, banning of whatever flavor
seems perfectly reasonable to me.

On <http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/>, where I've seen the most use of
disemvoweling (and several discussions of it and other techniques for
defending community and rational conversation), disemvoweling of a comment is
often followed by a moderator's brief explanation to fellow community members
what about the comment was objectionable. There's also often an invitation to
the commenter to try alternative approaches to the discussion, or to join in
other conversations on the site that might be easier to discuss politely.

------
chriserin
Open discussion, democracy and transparency is certainly the goal of the
internet at large, but individual sites have different incentives. The
moderator has curating as one of their responsibilities and they probably have
a general sense of the kind of discussion they'd like to foster.

Moderators and site-owners should take all measures at their disposal so that
they can shape the overall experience of the site they envision. In the end,
whatever mix of authoritarianism and democracy achieves that is fine.

That being said, hellbanning seems cruel. I think that all punishment should
be explicit because the trick is to cultivate reasonable users rather than to
pick and choose. I'd prefer some sort of comment rate adjustment as punishment
(1 per day, 1 per hour, 1 per quarter hour, etc). As from personal experience,
most obnoxious comments derive from a mixture of caffeine and passion.

------
sammyo
From the comments from folks here who were hellbaned that then subsequently
modified their behavior, the banning options in the software should have some
easily review periodic samples of the banned users posts so they can be
unbanned if the issue was a short term anomaly.

------
Rickasaurus
I love the hellban idea. It's like the light and dark world from legend of
Zelda.

------
sfgfdhgfdshdhhd
Hellbanning? Wow. Talk about paternalism, judgment-elitism and power-madness.

Hellbanning really has to be a method of last resort for users with who
repeatedly come back with problems for the community and with at least 2
admins agreeing on the ban. Not as a "i don't agree with this guy, byee".

I was once hellbanned from reddit for 2 months before i noticed it, i had
never posted any really offensive posts and nothing even close to trolling, i
had many top posts in discussions on the programming subredit and then
suddenly the account went dark. After i noticed the ban i asked an admin about
it and they did not even have a record of why it was banned, he took a look at
my posts and concluded there had to be some mistake. WTF?! "Some mistake"
During the ban i had spent tons of time replying to posts in thought that it
would be of help or interest to someone, all just going down into some black
hole.

The positive i got out of that experience was that posting on internet forums
isn't worth my time and i stoped posting on almost all internet forums i had
previously been active in (And yet still i am here writing this shit ^_^ )

If i made something wrong i want to know about it, not everyone is an active
troll and i find it hard to believe the trolling problem is so big you have to
throw away hellbans left and right without even thinking. There are many
stories similar to mine, especially on reddit.

