The Joel on Software forum was the first place I encountered it, but on a per-post basis. The first time I found out a post of mine had been ignored[1] in this deceptive way, I left and never went back.
It's a valid mechanism for outright spam, but seems to get overused as sites get more mature. I think you should basically never hellban anyone who has ever done anything even marginally useful on your site. Either talk to such miscreants or explicitly ban them so they know what you did.
[1] It was a meta post. JoS didn't allow meta posts. But it was hard to know this because.. it's a meta rule. And you could keep posting meta posts in ignorance and never get feedback that this was undesired behavior.
> I think you should basically never hellban anyone who has ever done anything even marginally useful on your site. Either talk to such miscreants or explicitly ban them so they know what you did.
It's a matter of ratio. Is their marginally useful contribution worth the hassle that they cause?
Rooting a troll out of something like HN, or Reddit, or a forum is hard. They probably have more time than you.
Basically you need to tell apart those who do something bad, and those who know something is wrong and has penalties, and are still doing it. You seem to be claiming that there's no way to do this scalably. I disagree.
You said elsewhere in this thread that shadowbanning is required because otherwise they just create a new account. But the new account starts with none of the positive karma the old one did, so it is hellbanned in the usual way.
Literally all this takes is that the site support non-deceptive versions of ignore/kill/nuke/blast and use them the first few times. If the guy sees his stories being flagged and continues, then stop showing him that his stories are flagged.
It's a valid mechanism for outright spam, but seems to get overused as sites get more mature. I think you should basically never hellban anyone who has ever done anything even marginally useful on your site. Either talk to such miscreants or explicitly ban them so they know what you did.
[1] It was a meta post. JoS didn't allow meta posts. But it was hard to know this because.. it's a meta rule. And you could keep posting meta posts in ignorance and never get feedback that this was undesired behavior.