I dislike the idea of hellbans just because it is invisible to the non-banned community, and they are unaware of how they are being "shaped." I think I've seen it happen on a "maker" blog where the comment wasn't really negative, but just not positive enough. In that case the moderator was trying to maintain a "very positive" environment. Pernicious.
You can turn on show dead and see the hellbanned comments. Most of the time it's justified. The only occasions I've ever made the effort to contact someone and tell them they're hellbanned was after the girls in tech fiasco 6 months back, I thought the comment that banned him was just a bit stupid & misunderstood. And the rest of his comments really good.
So there are some of us keeping and eye on the 'shaping' and you can too if you want.
There's actually some amazing comments by a crazy guy who's written an OS dedicated to god, it's pretty insane and yet incredibly impressive at the same time.
That's very good that "show dead" shows hellbanned, and all I could ask for. And it's not like I was worried about HN specifically, more the ability of smaller, more focused sites to self-AstroTurf by omission.
That's true of moderation in general though - it's pernicious because it conceals from the community what exactly is being concealed from the community. I've seen this become a problem on sites as diverse as Groklaw, Jezebel, the Adafruit blog, and a number of other places.
HN is relatively transparent in that it has showdead. On most websites there's no way of telling what's missing.
