
Ask pg: why have hellbans become so widespread on HN? - anigbrowl
Having <i>Showdead</i> enabled in m HN profile, I see comments and submissions from banned users as well as those which are flagged by mods and HN users. Many users, unaware of being banned, continue to post to HN. Over the last 3 months I have noticed a significant uptick in the number of banned &#x27;regular&#x27; users (as opposed to spammers, SEO bots and so forth).<p>Almost every day I see worthwhile comments and submissions made in good faith that have been automatically flagged. Now, I know that on a site called &#x27;Hacker News&#x27; informing users that their username or their IP has been banned or restricted is asking for trouble, but on the other hand there&#x27;s a lot of valuable content posted in good faith that is being hidden, and the amount seems to be increasing.<p>Can this policy be reviewed or clarified in some fashion?
======
pg
As I said 4 weeks ago, the reason you see good comments from banned accounts
is that people who behave abusively don't do it 100% of the time:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926081)

If my proposed plan for a new "pending" state for comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6009523](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6009523)

works out, we'll just unban most of the accounts that were banned for being
garden variety idiots or assholes, and their good comments can be promoted
individually by other users.

Incidentally, when a comment is dead, it's not always because the user is
banned. E.g. the comment that seems to have set off anigbrowl

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060403)

was not killed because the user is banned, but because it was a dupe.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058500)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058489)

When you see stories that are killed rather than comments, it's usually
because they've been submitted by sockpuppet rings. There are quite a lot of
those accounts on HN now, and many of them are smart enough to mix a variety
of other sites in with the sites they're promoting. Benologist, who helped us
catch some of them, has more details here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6061108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6061108)

~~~
anigbrowl
Thanks for the clarification pg. I was inspired to start the thread by virtue
of a different post altogether, but it's good to have a clearer picture of how
things work behind the scenes.

 _When you see stories that are killed rather than comments [...]_

That I've been less concerned about, as I spend a lot of time on the New page
and flag there pretty frequently, so those patterns are more obvious.

------
benologist
There are a _lot_ of spammers either automatically submitting links or
manually continuing to do so long after being identified and they're not
always obvious. The other week I found a network of ~20 accounts that had each
been submitting one generic tech link a day for up to 1.5 years, if you browse
when that network does their daily submissions you'll see almost a full page
of dead links that look legitimate.

The ability to upvote dead comments out of oblivion would be useful for
commenters.

Edit: as luck would have it that group is submitting a batch right now -
[http://i.imgur.com/MVvfoaC.png](http://i.imgur.com/MVvfoaC.png) \- all those
dead accounts (+ aynlaplant, flag to help kill it) are spam though they don't
look like it at first glance.

~~~
gruseom
Is that a Chrome extension or Greasemonkey script you've written to do
analytics on top of HN? It looks cool.

~~~
benologist
Greasemonkey script + optional server:

[https://github.com/benlowry/hnsubmitterstats](https://github.com/benlowry/hnsubmitterstats)

------
RKoutnik
He may have tightened up the restrictions on voting rings. I know one YC user
who was banned, and the only issue was that he'd send out links to a couple of
friends asking for upvotes.

I feel that there's Catch-22 here - so few people browse/upvote in `/new` that
one's practically forced to get friends to upvote, but then runs the risk of
automated banhammer. More transparency would be great. It's ironic that pg
calls for openness in government but governs HN behind closed doors.

~~~
redthrowaway
>It's ironic that pg calls for openness in government but governs HN behind
closed doors.

It may be ironic, but it's not hypocritical. Rules that apply to governments
need not, and should not, apply to private citizens or corporations.
Government can't endorse a religion, but people are free to. Similarly, it
would be bizarre if CEOs were voted for by employees.

Government needs to be transparent in order to live up to the maxim that
government should operate with the informed consent of the governed. Private
entities have no such moral compulsion.

~~~
krapp
Every social website (I include forums in this category) is, at its core,
someone's experiment in autocracy. There's no escaping this, however much
power users might appear to have, the admin will do what the admin wants and
mods are gods.

Whether this implies anything by extension about the nature of governments or
militaries I leave as a futile thought exercise for others.

~~~
X4
You are right, but I am not sure which social model would fit to everybody as
comforting. Many people are offended by Anarchy and it remains a question to
me if communities would actually be able to manage themselves or not. Do you
have some more food of thought to share, that's quite interesting? :)

~~~
krapp
I don't have any real insight. If any user at all could ban or unban anyone
else then it might be chaos. The autocratic nature of it comes from the fact
that someone and not everyone controls the code and the server. How could you
have true equality on a social site without giving users a dangerous level of
privilege?

------
rickdale
I used to have a different HN account. At some point I realized that I stopped
receiving points. I looked at my comments and someone had commented on my last
comment, "Is this spam?" and then like 4 other people concurred my comment was
spam. But it wasn't spam. I got bullied out of my HN account. 120 karma points
down the drain.

~~~
teawithcarl
After receiving 5000 karma points in June alone, due to the intersection of
Snowden news and my 27 years researching China - I noticed that my posts
started getting downvoted heavily by HN management.

HN management apparently does not believe Snowden news is hacker news.
Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, and Snowden have more than proven their hacker
skills in software, and censoring that news is not tolerable to me. All the YC
companies combined are insignificant compared that important work.

Personally, I believe we've already reached "peak" Hacker News and "peak" Y
Combinator. Even though I respect YC, HN, and PG, the main problem is that the
number of users continues to grow, and the basic code behind HN hasn't changed
in years. Indeed, what new code there is seems to be refinement in excluding
people.

Journalists worldwide are descending on HN as a clear cut seminal news source,
and no software is being written to maintain the integrity of HN, given the
new influx of lay users. Banning is a blunt, ineffective tool to manage HN
growth.

I am one of the earliest software engineers on earth (42 years), and
remember/prefer the early pure days of HN (as we all do). I have many ideas
how to solve that, however more and more hell banning wont do it. Give a man a
hammer and everything looks like a nail. Ward Cunningham's (inventor of the
wiki) new work on federated wikis is excellent, trailblazing work on
maintaining purity in an fast growing editorial environment. Allowing multiple
"views" of HN is a better approach. Google Search does it well - every Google
user has a unique "view", even on identical search terms.

Partly, I think PG would rather maintain his personal bully pulpit (he's
earned it) than build a better mousetrap at HN. Editorial monoculture is
always easier to build than an open multiview.

Funny part is, an open design would allow the original pure HN to be one of
the "views" (and likely the main view). HN will never ban its way back to
purity.

Attempts to return to purity via downvoting, censorship, and hell banning
alone are bad software. The fact that HN leadership thinks this way is the
primary reason for the fall in quality at HN. The growth in readership does
not have to dumb down HN. Write better software.

I've contributed solidly to the HN community, especially with early breaking
news in China technology, censorship, and gov't sponsored hacking. Yet, I'm
80% banned, even though my careful submits ranked #1 on the HN leaderboard in
June.

I have never spammed, never organized up voting, and have abided by the the
rules as I understand them.

The ban hammer is a tool, but a relatively an ineffective tool. It won't solve
the problem.

~~~
teawithcarl
By the way, this "ask PG" post just dropped from #5 on HN to #32 in just a few
minutes. Management at HN, if you can't stand the heat, why build the kitchen?

~~~
krapp
"Management at HN" is probably just pg rolling his eyes and muttering "not
this shit again..."

~~~
teawithcarl
Not true, I've received a letter from HN management, and have witnessed a
subtle, concerted effort to censor content.

------
GuiA
The goal of HN is post quality.

One potential explanation is that false positives (banning a good user) don't
bring down overall post quality, false negatives (not banning a bad user) do.

~~~
SapphireSun
That is true (assuming it's random). However, it's also unjust and harms the
community simply because this issue exists. The goal is to hellban only people
who deserve it.

EDIT: I just realized I have showdead on and I've barely seen any, so this may
not be a big problem.

~~~
ecaradec
Hellbanned people may also get upset of not receiving any feedback from the
community from good comments, conclude that the community is not for them and
quit which may explain that you only see a few.

------
DanBC
i) sometimes the domains, and not the users, are what is banned.

ii) Some hellbanned users know they are hellbanned but continue to post anyway

iii) The recent uptick may be connected to the flood of piss-poor threads
about politics. I'm not sure. I'd like to see some kind of numbers to confirm
that there are more hell-banned users.

There are several things you can do with hellbanned posts. You could check the
user's post history and try to work out what got them banned, and then send
them an email to let them know they're banned. That's one reason why it's
important for people to have an email in their "about me" section of their
profile.

It might be worth-while investigating a tweak, because it seems HN is
reluctant to flag and downvote poor content, and that might be because HN
users are reluctant to cause a hellban.

------
consz
I agree, I spent over a year posting regularly (1-2 times a week) on an
account that was hellbanned before I finally found out nobody could see my
posts.

It also bothers me that downvoted posts have lighter/more transparent text. It
makes it really hard to read, and most downvoted posts are interesting to
read, so it's damaging to my eyes to have to read those posts with some weird
text editing on it.

~~~
X4
hmm, yeah the typography used on HN is very poor, that's true. I think that's
intended, but it would have been possible to mark such posts differently and
less disturbing to the eye. (Personally I don't think that the HN UI is going
to get some overhaul anytime soon though.)

------
vyrotek
Speaking hell banned users. Here's a comment from one of them right here!
Sometimes they scare me a little. This is an example of it doing its job.
Sadly we do have false-positives sometimes too.

\---

 _TempleOS 27 minutes ago

God is perfectly just. Niggers deserve hell. Hell is the absence of God. God
says... by_the_way no_more_tears middle_class thats_just_wrong little_buddy
test_pilot not_in_my_wildest_dreams this_might_end_badly catastrophe husband
good talk_to_my_lawyer ohh_thank_you thats_right au_revoir so_let_it_be_done
off_the_record like_like experts ridiculous_

~~~
krapp
TempleOS isn't a standard by which the utility of hellbans should be judged.
He's pretty much the definition of _edge case_.

Most hellbans are probably spam, followed by people unaware of what random and
arbitrary rule they broke at some point in the past, followed by trolls.

~~~
Udo
He's a racist schizophrenic religious fanatic who never, ever posts remotely
on topic. Some of his posts advocate death and violence. How in the world
could this be considered an _edge case_? It's the definition of creepy. Isn't
Losethos/TempleOS/whatever more like the reference case for hellbanning?

The way I understand it hellbanning is supposed to protect us from both spam
and abusive content. TempleOS is both.

~~~
krapp
It's an edge case in that he doesn't represent the typical hellbanned user. I
agree that in his case, it's for the best that his posts aren't public.

I'm also convinced most or all of his posts are script generated anyway, not
that it really matters.

~~~
Udo
You're right, but I don't have a clear picture what the typical hellbanned
user looks like. There are spam bots submitting stories, but you don't see
them in discussions. Hellbanned users you actually meet in threads are, at
least as best as I can recollect, most often posting normal stuff that
wouldn't rank as low quality. Sometimes I click on their history to see where
things went wrong and it's usually not hard to find this one post that ended
their account. It doesn't matter if all the rest of it was pretty good, that's
all it takes: one glitch.

I'm not sure if I'd say this is a good system or not. Maybe it would be more
productive to have a time limit on bans that result from one-time offenses.

------
pygy_
Case in point:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=loginalready](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=loginalready)

I reported it to info@yc, two days ago, but I didn't get any answer.

~~~
wtvanhest
Yeah, I actually find his/her comments intelligent, but maybe too political.
If he/she restructured the wording, he/she would be getting huge karma.

Maybe hellbaned was extreme, but HN is not a place for political commentary.

------
superflit
Do not talk against the lefties or any vocal group you will be ok.

Because there is no 'disagree' people down vote.

~~~
newnewnew
Hacker News is leftist, but they are not too quick with the down votes on
dissidents. This is not reddit, yet.

I prefer to keep all politics off of HN, because otherwise this will become
another site where leftists pat other leftists on the back and no real
discussion is permitted.

~~~
kropotkin
Are you guys joking? I've been reading Hacker News on and off for years and
the majority of the people here are squarely center-right. I can count on one
hand the number of regular commenters that I'd consider to be on the Left.

Hacker News is for the most part a forum for pro-Capitalists interested in
technology.

~~~
newnewnew
The construction of any political spectrum depends upon the time period over
which you define it. The political poles of the last six months are a lot
closer than the political poles generated from data collected over the last
six decades.

Me, I've been reading a lot of Mencius Moldbug lately, so my political ideas
are going to be fairly abnormal. Discussing politics with me is going to be
like discussing colors of a painting with a gentleman on DMT.

------
millerm
Happened to me. I was a member for a long time. On a single occasion I believe
I accidentally responded to the wrong comment and I got banned. I was posting
for a long time before an admin informed me I was banned. I had no idea why
until I looked back at my responses and I noticed one out of context.

I had always been a fan of this site and try to join in a discussion once in a
while to be part of a community. It really ruined my day when I found out I
had been banned. I felt betrayed and lost my 100+ karma.

------
stock_toaster
I also have showdead on, and sometimes I consider turning it off, as some
people _really do_ warrant it. It is indeed sad to see some other people
railing against the wind though.

~~~
bavcyc
I turned it on after reading this askHN and it was interesting, but I think
I'm more thankful for not seeing a bunch of the dead links and comments.

------
mschuster91
Interestingly, this post had 8 upvotes, now it's only 6 - I thought posts
could not be downvoted?

~~~
UberMouse
You can downvote once you've reached a certain karma level.

~~~
esalazar
Do you know which karma level?

~~~
simcop2387
500 for user comments, as far as i know submissions can't be. That being said
i know there are voting ring checks and other fuzzing going on where it might
not actually be someone downvoting, but votes being counted differently all
the sudden.

------
stfu
Is there actually any discussion among those who are hellbanned? Otherwise it
could be argued that if somebody keeps posting without noting the lack of
interaction they probably aren't that much socially aware in the first place.

------
dfc
_" I know that on a site called 'Hacker News' informing users that their
username or their IP has been banned or restricted is asking for trouble,"_

Does PG have a policy against this? I seen people point out that so-and-so was
hellbanned before and never noticed any repurcussions and I have also seen
people repost useful comments from users who were hell banned.

Or do you think "the trouble" stems from the word hacker in the site name?

------
jacques_chester
There are more users.

------
arikrak
Instead of hellbanning, couldn't the site just rely on more extensive
algorithmic ranking of comments and submissions? That way comments that are
probably low-quality will only appear to a small number of users.

------
mynameishere
And why haven't I been hellbanned yet? Look at my comment history! Look at
it!!! Did I get grandfathered in or something?

------
ancarda
I find it interesting hell banned users are still posting. For instance, i'm
sure TempleOS is aware he's banned.

------
DiabloD3
So what stops everyone from protesting and using showdead? Doesn't that
basically depower mods?

------
shravan
How are you able to tell whether you've been hellbanned or not? Have I, for
instance?

~~~
krapp
You're not hellbanned.

But of course, you're not supposed to be able to tell, that's the entire
point.

~~~
paulftw
is it IP based, or will chrome anonymous window be enough to always reliably
tell my status?

~~~
PavlovsCat
I don't think it's IP based, no.

------
untilHellbanned
i'm waiting to see how long it takes for my username to get me hellbanned

~~~
avalaunch
I doubt the username will ever get you hellbanned. The useless comments might.

~~~
untilHellbanned
honest question to you and YC hellbanners:

"why so serious?"

[http://static.tumblr.com/hdts1a0/4gum6dv0j/why_so_serious.jp...](http://static.tumblr.com/hdts1a0/4gum6dv0j/why_so_serious.jpg)

------
paulftw
omg. you can be banned but still allowed to post?!

how do I check whether my account is banned?

~~~
X4
I was as surprised as you were! Would never ever post to HN personally if I
knew that.

Not letting people know that they are banned, but still allowing them to post
is very egoistic.

~~~
jlgreco
Egoist? Why?

As far as I can tell it is somewhat distasteful but ultimately too useful to
not use. It's pragmatic, I don't see how ego is involved.

~~~
X4
What if you were banned from school and still had to pay them without knowing
that you got banned. Even worse, what if all of your schoolmates would ontop
of that start ignoring you and nothing you do could change it? Wouldn't that
be an egoistic act?

    
    
        Legend: pay = posts; schoolmates = HN people/investors

~~~
ctdonath
You're not paying to use HN, so the analogy is a non-sequitur.

You're a guest in pg's house; hellbanning is a generous form of dealing with
the unruly by at least letting them visit and talk to those who want to hear
the unruly, without either letting the unruly annoy all the guests or throwing
some out entirely.

~~~
X4
>> hellbanning is a generous form of dealing with the unruly by at least
letting them visit and talk to those who want to hear the unruly, without
either letting the unruly annoy all the guests or throwing some out entirely

That argument is convincing, but I still believe that it's not fair treatment
to not letting them at least know about their ban. I didn't know that the
unruly can still talk to others. That's changing things completely!

------
TerraHertz
Well that's interesting. I didn't even know there was such a thing on this
site.

All net forums have owners, and almost all have defacto restricted topics -
things the owners simply won't allow. In many cases, one of the restricted
topics is what well known 'cultural entity' the owners are members of.

What does differ is the degree of sneakiness in what's forbidden, and the
methods used to enforce the restrictions.

In a few cases it's forthright - there's a FAQ listing forbidden topics; you
say what you're not supposed to, and you're banned. But that's rare. It's more
often the case that forbidden topics are so forbidden that they aren't even
mentioned in the rules as forbidden. And the site's operation is structured to
provide means of quietly removing offending comments from public view.

It's all about controlling the perception of common public opinion, while
avoiding being seen to do so. There are many tricks used.

In almost all sites, there are cliques of semi-official mods, with the power
to remove/alter what's visible. The Wikipedia global warmist clique being a
prime example. Even when the clique isn't officially part of the site's
control system, Megaphone-like back-channel organization makes very powerful
manipulation via mass down-voting and pile-on criticism possible. Then there's
the HB Gary-esque 'multiple personas' methods, by which groups of paid shills
can exert far more web influence than they should be able to.

But what's really disturbing, is when forums that pretend to be open and
politically unbiased, are structured to provide hidden methods of control -
and they are clearly using them.

For instance, on reddit the '500 visible post limit' provides a way of
vanishing politically unwelcome posts. On 4chan, the ephemeral nature of
everything makes it easy to vanish posts faster than they otherwise would.

With ycombinator I thought the control method was pretty obvious, and I'd
experienced it myself. Make any mention of anything related to 'topic-Y', and
get instantly downvoted into the negatives. OK, I could live with that. It's a
pity, but then hardly anything unique in this sadly upside-down, tiny-dot
ruled world.

Now it turns out... that ycombinator is also applying 'holo-net' techniques?
Am I understanding this right? A hellbanned person sees their own posts
appearing normally, but they are hidden to everyone else (unless they turn on
'showdead' \- and now I have to go find out how to do that.)

You know, that's a _very_ immoral and deceptive facility to implement in a
forum. It almost reminds me of... stereotypical behavioral characteristics
of... something I can't mention here, for fear of being hellbanned.

My gradually recovered vote count is now 54. I expect it to now suddenly go
negative. Again.

I hope you guys realize that free, open and unrestricted public debate is
crucial to the maintenance of civilization? And that deploying means of
distorting and controlling debate will achieve only one thing in the end - the
collapse of civilization into a hell of violence and insanity. It takes time,
but it's inevitable. Special interest groups, whether ideological or ethnic,
are _never_ capable of acting rationally in the interests of the greater good.
They always behave like drowning persons - strangling those who are keeping
things afloat.

Of course, whether certain special interest groups actually want to bring down
civilization - that's a fair question.

~~~
DanBC
> It's all about controlling the perception of common public opinion, while
> avoiding being seen to do so.

No. It really is much simpler. Some people make intensely but shallowly
interesting posts. Some people respond to those posts because intense posts
cause that kind of reaction. Other people downvote that kind of post because
they recognise its toxic to the community to have that kind of discussion
here. Eventually a poster learns to avoid that kind of post, or they get
hellbanned.

(But yes, there are false positives and that sucks for those people and the
community.)

> I hope you guys realize that free, open and unrestricted public debate

I look forward to visiting the fork of HN that you put up. On your website. At
your expense.

