The only exception (and this might be in the article as well, but I'll mention it because it's IMO the only exception) is when you've got a recurring troll, one that gets banned, and IP-banned, but returns through a new proxy every time. At that point, wasting as much of their time as possible is pretty much your only defence. Although in my own experience, even then, slow-banning works just as well if not better. And I've experimented with a number of very novel deterrence methods when I was forum-admin on a (sometimes) rather trollish forum, but only against the truly notorious bad apples. That place, it was of utmost importance to be as light-handed with modding as possible, because drama is really sticky.
In all other situations you are just wasting the valuable time of normal people. Normal people you may disagree with, or ones that are really really difficult. But some of our favourite hackers and open source coders are really really difficult people. If you hell-ban someone, they might not notice for a few months, spending effort on their posts, you really burned a bridge there.
And don't forget you will make mistakes, somebody makes one thoughtless tasteless (awful) joke, gets hellbanned, continues contributing their valuable insights like nothing happened (because they don't know) until they somehow find out (which can take a long time), I have seen this happen on HN, and it is such a terrible waste of the bright minds we have here. That is why I am opposed to hell-bans.
Thanks for explaining. It seems to me that the dynamic would be less problematic on IRC, because it'll be much more quickly apparent that people don't see what you're writing.
I could see it being used as the last step in a series of escalating steps, where a hellban is only used after repeated violations and evading a more regular ban. But now we're getting into levels of rules and bureaucracy that probably aren't worth it.
I am opposed to hellbanning on hacker news. I believe it hurts our community for the following reasons:
* It lacks transparency - nobody knows who is hellbanned, and why they were hellbanned. There is no appeal.
* It is a crude tool - hellbanning somebody fails to take into account that they could reform their behavior, or just have made some bad decisions in the heat of an argument.
* There have been cases I have seen where useful or interesting comments have been lost because the poster is hellbanned. This demonstrates that it doesn't just have theoretical flaws - it actually is causing us to lose valuable content.
Someone who is hellbanned can come back with a new account. Or, if they feel it was a mistake they could write a short email explaining this and asking for an unban.
> useful or interesting comments have been lost because the poster is hellbanned.
> Someone who is hellbanned can come back with a new account. Or, if they feel it was a mistake they could write a short email explaining this and asking for an unban.
Um, are we talking about the same word here?
How can they do that? The whole point of a hell-ban is that for them everything looks normal, just the way it should be if nothing had happened.
Unless they happen to stumble upon it (viewing from another IP, maybe a friend emailed them), there's no reason to assume any action at all is required.
That is my whole point: the useless waste of time in order to even find out you were hell-banned.
As soon as you start noticing your comments haven't been getting any replies or upvotes for a couple of days: start getting nervous. You might've tripped a mod, they are often fair, but they are also human, and that's a couple of days of comments that the large "showdead=0" majority of HN simply hasn't seen.
Many people who see hellbanned posts check the history of the poster. If they can't see a reason for the ban they try to let the person know. (Another reason why it's a good idea to include an email address in your profile information.)
While HN HellBanning has banned some people unfairly it also bans a lot of spam and disruptive trolls.
I appreciate that we have different attitudes here. I'm happy with a small false-positive rate.
I guess people could check their comments using incognito mode; maybe there's even a plug-in to do that?
I see your point why it's not as hurtful as it could be. In practice, 99% of the time it isn't. I am of the opinion, however, that there's time-tested tried and true more classic modding and adminning solutions, that are just as effective, that do not take significantly more effort either.
And that's the thing, except for the few rare cases I've outlined (IMO so rare that it's cost effective to just special-case it in code, rather than making an easy admin button for it), it's just not necessary to waste people's time like that.
One other aspect in which it actually performs worse: if you get banned, you get noticed. so you know you did something wrong. and you can work to fix this. the amount of people for which this "slap on the wrists" actually works, is actually a lot larger than the amount of sociopaths that will never ever learn and actually require hellbanning and other tricks to get rid of.
