Your point is not unfounded, and it's our duty as research scientists to justify the value you receive for your money.
There's a famous example where a US Senator asked a similar question of a research physicist prior to the establishment of Fermilab, specifically tailored toward defense application [1].
SENATOR PASTORE. Is there anything here that projects us in a position of being competitive with the Russians, with regard to this race?
DR. WILSON. Only from a long-range point of view, of a developing technology. Otherwise, it has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things that we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about.
In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.
To address your concerns more directly: Basic and exploratory research pushes scientists to extract the very highest performance one can get from known technology. On occasion, that technology can do something exceptional (precision timekeeping, GPS, vaccines, medical imaging, etc.). The highly-motivated people who do this work tend to be willing to do it at low salaries and with limited chance for advancement, simply because they love the field. You can think of it as a low-cost government-run VC fund that aims for the occasional spectacular payoff at multi-decade timescales.
Another key benefit is education: research funding underpins the post-graduate education of most people in the physical scientists. Funding basic research, which companies won't usually touch, furthers the continuous supply of a top-notch skilled workforce for industry nationwide.
Furthermore, in many fields, retaining a trained and knowledgeable corps of scientists is an efficient way to retain the capability to respond to sudden and important societal needs (Manhattan Project, Ebola, asteroid mitigation, Fukushima, etc.).
I'm biased, as taxpayer dollars pay for my work, but I think you're getting a reasonable-to-excellent return on your investment.
Fun Fact: Sen. Pastore was the grumpy committee chairman when Mr. Rogers gave that famous speech about the value of public television for children. I don't know if Dr. Wilson swayed Pastore to support more funding, but after listening to Mr. Rogers for six minutes Pastore switched from wanting to cut PBS funding in half to cheerleading for increased funding:
That was amazing to watch. Thank you for sharing. It was really something to see Senator Pastore, who began the session as an adversary to Mr. Rogers, come around slowly to Mr. Rogers' way of thinking in just under seven short minutes.
For anyone who's wondering, we haven't banned this account. What happens is that when karma gets low enough to be in outlier territory, comments get auto-killed. This is a longstanding anti-troll measure.
In the future, we plan to have a "moderated" status for comments, rather than "dead", so that the community will be able to fix cases where the commenter is not a troll or has corrected their ways. In the meantime, if you ever notice something being [dead] unfairly, emailing hn@ycombinator.com is usually enough to correct it. (Edit: but do please allow for the variable latency of our email stack. We will get back to you, but there's no SLA on when.)
Roseta mission is 1 400 000 000 euro. London summer olympics costed almost 10 000 000 000 euro. Consider the benefits.
Landing on comets and knowing what materials are there (and how to detect that from distance) will eventually let humanity explore solar system. In next 10000 years it's almost sure there will be at least one global cataclysm (huge asteroid impact, ice age, global warming, methane-producing bacteria boom, some supervulcaon could go off). It's just statistics, we're in borrowed time anyway.
You don't have kids yet, I take it? One of the most universal desires parents have is for our children to live better than we did, hence the sacrifices we make to fund education etc.
We are not talking about throwing away everything to insure ourselves against future catastrophe, we're putting a small portion towards a bit of futureproofing. Seems smart to me.
To be clear I love to see funding going towards science. But 10,000 years is too damn much. People are placing chronologically the technological singularity within the next 100-200 years. For all practical purposes, 10,000 years ahead it's simply a different universe for me.
You said "within the next 10,000 years". So where's your cut-off point? 1,000? 100? 10?
There are things we need to prepare for and there are advantages to starting now. Every advance we make is a foundation for something else. I think there are things we take for granted today that only exist because of some urge to explore and learn thousands of years ago.
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."
To be selfish, I'm keen to see what we can find out about our world (including beyond Earth obviously) in my lifetime. Something like the comet landing is a step along a far bigger path to getting all our eggs out of a single basket situation.
Ah, that's just your DNA talking. Otherwise we could be immensely pleased with the amazing experience of being alive, and when our time is up allow Mother Universe to move on without us. Perhaps after we are wiped out, another better form of life will take hold and really do amazing things, fueled by our decay.
Besides, it looks like our own behavior is going to do it for us, so might as well "love the bomb".
We are alive as far as we want to be alive. We can be that "better form" of life, it's questionable that a better form of life can emerge from scratch. If our own behavior is going to get us extinct, so be it, let's help the nature then!
Besides that, I think that personification of "Mother Universe" is just a xenophobic form of human fear of the "otherness" surrounding us. There is no monolithic Mother Universe, more probably, there is a mesh of living creatures and natural phenomena we are a part of.
I guess that speaks to the dichotomy of urge in humans. We are equally as likely to sit on our butts staring mindlessly at something on a screen as we are to strive for extending the reaches and hopes of our species.
I hope it could be us that will do those amazing things you mentioned.
Because it has huge benefits and one could argue that the money that was funneled into NASA during the moon landings gave tax payers much more bang for their buck than all kinds of other research, social programs, bank bailouts, etc. These sorts of human achievement defining missions are really hundreds of thousands of hours of engineering dedicated to solving some of the hardest problems we can dream up.
You are way too short sighted if you cannot imagine the enormous benefits of having dedicated engineers, scientists and researchers working on difficult problems that don't have model-able, short-term returns. The exact types of problems that people only concerned with short-term balance sheets avoid like the plague. The exact types of problems that propel our entire civilization into new ages of discovery and technology.
So effectively, you want to subsidise scientists working on some arbitrary aim (Space exploration), in the hope they'll invent cool stuff you can spin off...
I don't think you need to subsidise science like this.
Did we really get "propelled" into new age of technology half a century ago? Did the moon landing really change anything here on earth? Technology would have advanced just fine without it.
It really sounds like you're trolling. If you're actually trying to have a debate in good faith, please read back over your posts and edit them to reflect that. Using dismissive language such as calling space probes "toys", or space exploration "some arbitrary aim" doesn't help your cause - it makes you sound juvenile, defensive, and bitter.
What other arbitrary aims would you rather scientists work on, since all aims are arbitrary anyways? I don't think you really understand how scientific research works at all.
The engineering effort of NASA took a bunch of disparate scientific discoveries and pieced them together to land humans on the moon. Don't tell me you don't think that sparked major economic development in this country for decades. One of the largest reasons America is an international economic powerhouse is the space race and the need for technological innovation during the cold war.
The entirety of humanity has been involved with exploring our curiosities. Exploring our curiosities tends to lead towards societal/scientific progress. Space is one of those.
Well, presumably if NASA is good because it produces things that can be spun off, you could just put the money into directly producing the spinoffs (somehow) and be more efficient.
>The entirety of humanity has been involved with exploring our curiosities. Exploring our curiosities tends to lead towards societal/scientific progress. Space is one of those.
I think this is almost certainly false. Very little of humanity has been involved with exploring any curiosity. Go to a third-world village and see how much curiosity is being explored.
It's also disingenuous to claim that NASA is some grand scientific curiosity mission. NASA is part of the military-industrial complex and operates as a slightly more palatable alternative to designing ICBM's directly. This is sort of like how mathematicians work for the NSA studying problems that are sanitized to be unrelated to the actual problem the NSA is trying to solve. It's a modern, scientific equivalent of a blank round in the firing squad.
Personally, I think that space exploration is a good thing because having all your species-level eggs in one planetary basket is a bad idea, but these are not compelling arguments in favor of space exploration, and they don't stand up to very easy to form arguments.
> I think this is almost certainly false. Very little of humanity has been involved with exploring any curiosity. Go to a third-world village and see how much curiosity is being explored.
Throughout human history the vast majority of the population did nothing to contribute to the progress of society, except doing their job to keep their current society running. Eventually we figured out how to produce enough food without having everyone work all the time. The new free time could be used for arts and science; progress became possible.
But I think it's wrong to dismiss all the people who produce neither art nor knowledge. Without them, humanity couldn't afford to feed poets and scientists.
You should check out 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley'
Steve Blank (its author) did a nice job marshaling evidence for just how much the Silicon Valley of today has depended on technology advanced through big government programs.
I'm an American, and I'm fascinated by space exploration. These kind of endeavors bring people together and make us look at the Earth as one entity that we all need to live on. It brings people together by strengthening trust through a common goal and achievement.
Now, as far as the "hur-dur my tax monies..." argument. I wonder if he has heard of the asteroid mining company in the US. Planetary resources speculats that a single 30 meter diameter asteroid could have over $50 billion[1] worth in platinum. Developing technology like ESA has done obviously helps advance a companies that can bring these resources back to Earth. So, I feel like he has to be trolling unless he really just hasn't had ANY interest in space exploration from the start. But, if he is going to out-right dismiss the program, he needs to have done some searching to at least form an opinion for why it is bad. Very untactful.
I hope this mission (and hopefully future missions like this) will either confirm or deny a claim like that - TBH, large claims like that kinda sound like space mining companies trying to get people to invest large amounts of money into their business.
I think this is part of a bigger question: should you only spend on basic survival? Individuals in developed countries now spend most of their resources on things that go beyond basic survival: education, entertainment, arts. Shouldn't we spend our collective resources the same way? If as individuals we want to expand our existence beyond survival, I think as groups we should, too, and fund pure science, history research and the arts, even if no material benefits come out of it.
I don't think your comment really deserves a response but here I am anyhow. It doesn't take much research to see the amazing discoveries that originated from NASA.
Nations have a long history of funding exploratory ventures. It is generally understood that the process is useful for a variety of reasons: it creates jobs, there is a small chance that something practical could be discovered, and most importantly it satisfies a basic human need to know more. With this mission in particular, we may be able to answer some very fundamental questions about the arrival of organic compounds (or even life) on Earth...surely that's worth spending some money on?
You have the right to feel however you want, but a world without curiosity would be pretty sad; the internet wouldn't even exist for us to have this discussion.
Hijacking the top comment in this subthread to make a meta-complaint:
The comment-parents viewpoint is perfectly valid, but has been censored because of disagreement within the broader HN community.
For all the talk about "free speech" that HN does when the topic is, say, not objectifying women, or making racial minorities feel included in tech, it certainly seems to perform an about-face when confronted with... objecting to space science as a policy.
1. Doesn't it seem a little outlandish to have your priorities so far out of whack with respect to the number of non-whites in the world, versus the number of space scientists in the world?
2. Why should the comment-parent be flagkilled for expressing an unpopular opinion?
>"Why should the comment-parent be flagkilled for expressing an unpopular opinion?"
A comment shouldn't be killed for expressing an unpopular opinion and I don't think this one was.
That comment is a perfect example of how not to state an opinion, unpopular or otherwise.
It states an opinion as absolute and demands proof otherwise while providing none of its own. This is recognized as awful, trollish behavior on any forum.
Further, the opinion stated is derisive and emotional. Finally, the it begs for downvotes repeatedly.
This is exactly the sort of thing that should be killed regardless of the view expressed.
I can't speak for everybody (and I didn't personally take any action against the comment in question), but I imagine the reaction was due to the tone of the message. HN is generally a community which tolerates unpopular opinions if they are presented thoughtfully; dismissing scientific research as "playing with toys" and failing to elucidate the reasoning behind a dissenting opinion does not meet that bar.
Sorry for the double response: my previous comment still stands, but I wanted to add this as well.
The treatment of women and exclusion of minorities in this field is incredibly distressing. The thought of how many brilliant minds we could be turning away (not to mention the basic empathy I feel for their suffering) makes me sick. I look forward to a more enlightened age when these people will be welcomed with the basic respect and dignity they deserve.
...but, apathy towards education and scientific progress is also incredibly distressing - that a smaller absolute number of people are affected does not make the issue less important. Climate change denial and lack of enthusiasm for clean energy are complicated phenomena, but are (in my opinion) partially influenced by a culture that devalues science and education (in addition to outright manipulation by insidious parties). If you want proof of how dangerous this is, look at Mario Zervigon[0], a campaign-finance director for a pro-solar candidate - his house and cars were firebombed last week. This (admittedly unusually extreme) resistance to the idea that we should be taking care of our environment is mind-fuckingly insane. The library of Alexandria is still very much in peril, so to speak.
So...us freaking out about this doesn't mean we do not care about the exclusion of minorities. It's ok to be worried about multiple things; there are more than enough causes to go around. We live in a sick, sad world[1].
1. Space scientists are in many ways the pinnacle of our civilization. Of course we place a high value on them.
2. Because it's not a positive contribution to the discussion.
Ok I'll bite. Do you really believe space exploration has "no benefit whatsoever", or are you just trolling?
A cursory Google search returns all kinds of counter-points to your claim. If you really do believe this, perhaps some brief research of your own will change your mind..
I've never understood the 'this OR that' argument. For the budgets nation states have, the spending is so diversified, one side can hardly complain that they are being treated unfairly or others are getting greater share of the budget.
You can do two or more things at one time, especially when they are totally unrelated.
I've heard this argument over and over during India's Mars mission on News debates, where people come on prime time television and complain health care, education or other sectors aren't doing enough progress so why go to Mars.
So what should those people do? If others don't do their job properly should they stop doing theirs? If there are other aspects of society not doing enough progress, lets fix that instead of stopping hardworking people from making progress else where.
Just trying to see your perspective, here: the LHC costed $15B of tax payer money; the NIH invests ~$30B every year in medical research. Do you also think those are example of how to waste money?
This opinion is short-sighted. There may be zero practical attributable scientific or engineering benefits, though I am sure there will be plentiful.
However, such epic events are extremely inspiring! It is massively televized, broadcasted, discussed on social media and news aggregators. This may be a single trigger that will send many curious young guys and girls towards STEM professions. And we need them inspired, motivated and engaged to build a better world for all humanity.
Wasted taxes? Are you serious? The outcome of this mission might be immense considering what possibilities are open if we manage to perfect such technologies. I'd say it's the greatest our race achievement after the Moon landing. Besides, the whole mission budget is only 1 billion euros (~1.2 billion dollars). If talking about wasting tax money, consider F-35 project which cost 1 trillion dollars and still counting, that's 1000 more than this mission.
The unit cost of one single F-35 jet was in 2011 estimated to be around 300 million USD, that is, only three planes would pay for the whole (European, please note, financed by the tax of Europeans!) Rosetta mission.
The US plans to buy 2443 such aircraft (of course, financed by the tax of US citizens). Do they really need so many of them?
The military budget of the US was recently around 660 billion USD per year, that is, the US could finance some 600 Rosettas (each a multiple-decade project) every year with its military budget. Approximating the Rosetta life to 10 years, in these 10 years the US spent 6000 Rosettas for military. Or 18000 of F-35 fighter jets.
Once upon a time, long long ago, the most powerful dinosaurs got together to consider the proposal of a young pterodactyl. The pterodactyl had come up with the strange proposal that the other dinosaurs should bring her food while she concentrated on devising ways to fly higher.
"Why should we all work harder so you can learn to fly higher?" roared a huge tyrannosaurus, and bit the pterodactyl's head clean off.
So their kind never discovered ways to fly higher, and out of the atmosphere, and all the multitude of skills required detect comets and fly spacecraft to them to find out what they were made of.
You weren't there. This is not how it happened at all.
The strong and mighty individualist T-Rex was enslaved by the communist mammals. The once idealistic Pterodactyl was forced to evolve into a chicken, bereft of its flight, today kept in captivity by the trillions, bred by robots, for meat and eggs. Their feathers fill our pillows. How ironic that Mankind's dreams are birthed atop their crushed wings.
What gives us the right to land on this comet?
Weren't the dinosaurs there first?
What about our robots? Who fills their pillowcases?
Do you really think that firstly, those technologies only exist because of NASA, and secondly that the cheapest way to innovate is to pick some arbitrary aim (Space exploration) and then spin off lots of innovation from it?
You could do a better job just taking the money spent on space exploration, and opening some innovation/invention centers.
edit: banned now, so I can't add any comments. It's really surprising just how extreme the religion of science is sometimes. Scary.
Humanity cannot survive on the Earth for eternity. Eventually we will have to move on to other habitable worlds. Doing so is an almost unimaginably difficult engineering task. This reason alone is sufficient to justify space exploration in my mind.
On a shorter time scale, there are massive amounts of resources in space that, with better technology, we could theoretically harvest for our use here on Earth. Once again, this is incredibly difficult to accomplish and won't happen without learning from experiments.
In the present, satellites are extremely beneficial to humanity, and factor into our everyday lives. In addition, space telescopes and space stations facilitate research that couldn't be done on Earth.
> You could do a better job just taking the money spent on space exploration, and opening some innovation/invention centers.
That is an extraordinary claim that I'd like to see some evidence of. Having an end goal presents you with a number of problems to solve, which then give you an opportunity to innovate. Simply throwing money at somebody and asking them to come up with something doesn't seem like it would be nearly as productive as saying "We need to put a man in space and have him not die and then have him come back to earth and not crash" and then breaking that down into the smaller set of problems which need to be solved for that to happen.
Well, they do now and from what we've seen funding space research leads to loads of technology. We already have innovation/invention centers, but having loads of people focused on one incredibly hard task will bring out lots of awesome stuff.
Health, welfare, lowering taxes, employment.... y'know, things that enrich real peoples lives.
Space toys and exploration are fun for those working on them, but will this event transform civilisation? Nope. Did the moon landing really transform civilisation? Nope.
How do you know the moon landing didn't transform civilization? Did you try living in an alternate timeline where it did not happen and find things to be the same?
What about all those scientists who learned to build rockets, who would later go on to help NASA launch the first weather satellites? What about the work done that led to the formation of the global positioning system? Are you sure it would have happened in the same timeframe by some other actors if NASA hadn't gone to the moon? Where would the scientists have gotten their training? What would have been the economic rationale for doing it?
Remember, too, that the moon landings were not scientific exploration. It was a military operation to prove supremacy. The russians put a man in space one month earlier, so Kennedy basically said "Yeah? you put a man in space? well we'll drop one on the Moon and then bring him back!"
It was an insane commitment to proving our supremacy. We sent fighter jet pilots on the first several missions, and didn't send a single scientist until several missions in.
Meanwhile, exploring the origins of comets helps us understand how the early solar system formed, which helps us understand how the universe formed, which helps us understand physics at a fundamental level, which helps us make better microchips, solar panels, and superconductors that make the tech in our world better at serving our needs.
It has nothing to do with "fun for those working on them", though I'm sure they have fun. Truck drivers probably have some fun too, but that doesn't mean delivering goods isn't worthwhile for legitimate economic reasons. Hard science is the same - it costs relatively little and the payoff, while abstract, is huge.
If you want to complain about spending, complain about military spending. In the US it is 70X NASA's budget, and 2x the military budget at the beginning of 2001. THAT is bloat. We know how to manufacture bombs. Making more doesn't do much for innovation. Funding science does.
I had to create an account just to thank you for this response. I always recommend anyone wondering about whether or not space exploration is worth it to view the following amazing video compilations.
WOW! the best answer by far in here, thanks for your comment it really proves all the benefits the ENTIRE human race gets from this (relative) small investment.
You're kidding right - this would have lowered my taxes by about 20 cents a year, or 3E50 total. Careful not to spend it all at once. So much for lowering taxes.
Simply put, Rosetta's budget was about 70m Euros per year over 20 years. That's like funding maybe two schools, or one hospital ward, spread over the whole EU. None of these enrich humanity as much as Rosetta is.
As for employment, well, the project is creating exactly the right sort of jobs for the European economy - that money is being spent in Europe, helping to usefully occupy the European aerospace industry, and thereby keeping engineers and scientists in work.
> Really? You're basically saying you'd prefer a robot on a comet over thousands of healthy and educated peers. Who are you to decide this?
Coming from an American this is pretty ironic. The choice in ESA-funding countries isn't between two schools and illiterate children, it's between further improvement to two good schools already affording excellent social mobility and a comet landing.
As for who decides this, the voters do as part of the democratic process.
It's much better to compare the cost of the whole Rosetta mission (cca 1 billion EUR) to the cost of the just one type of fighter jets, just for the UK: cca 30 billion EUR. Apparently the fleet is only around 100 planes at the time, giving the cost of the Rosetta for the whole Europe equal to the cost to the UK for just three planes in the UK military fleet of a 100 of such planes. It's mind boggling.
Sure i could point out that this mission could indirectly advance health technology (landing a robot on a comet is no small technological feat. The side-benefits of big research projects, such as the WWW that allows us to argue here, are no small thing)
But most importantly it bothers me that you think that risking a relatively small amount of money to expand our limits is not important. IF it were a "showoff" mission or a re-enactment of the moon landing, i would agree with you but this is about going into unknown territory. When Columbus set off to find a short path to the Indies, i bet someone would think the money was frivolously spent, but this guy never made it to the history books.
If you insist that we shouldn't take risks like this, you are literally asking the civilization to stop.
Does space exploration has the potential to transform civilization? Yeah it actually does. It represent funding in research, it represent dreams, it represent our future. It's also an amazing collaborative project between countries.
Also let not forget that NASA only represent 0.5% of the US federal budget. Do you really want to lower your federal tax by 0.5%? Seriously? Please lower your entertainment budget, stop alcohol and coffee consumption and donate all that money to a charity. If you actually believe that 0.5% should be put somewhere else because you doesn't believe they really transform civilization, then all that money that you use would probably be better somewhere else too.
I'm in favor of the space exploration spending, but your argument is terrible. (S)he could just as easily reply that if you believe that space exploration has so much potential to transform civilization, why don't you donate all your entertainment budget & etc to NASA?
He said that it wasn't worth it because it doesn't really transform civilization. That's his point. If it's the criteria to fund something, then how his expense can be worth it too?
Why don't I donate all to NASA? Because I never said that it was worth our money more than something else that worth more than what my entertainment is worth. (Sorry if it a little hard to understands, english isn't my first language, I'm still working on it).
Also I never said that it has so much potential, I'm curious to know where you found this in my comment. What I said is barely enough to said that it can actually compete against his alternative, I was really counting on the fact that it was only representing 0.5% of the budget to make it seems worthwhile.
EDIT: Hopefully you still haven't read this comment, I found a better way to explain what I said.
He said that it wasn't worth it because it doesn't really transform civilization.
I said that it was clearly worth its 0.5% of the funding.
I also said that if it's not worth it because it doesn't really transform civilization, how could his own budget can be justified (and to avoid him answering that in a way, his job does transform civilization enough to be worth his salary, I only included expense that could be avoided without affecting too much his job).
He could easily reply with that, but it would be dumb. There are many causes I believe in strongly but I don't donate all my money to them because I don't have enough money to make a bit of difference to them. Big projects must be taken on collectively.
Yes. Likewise, it doesn't make sense that just because you spend money on entertainment, you can't oppose (what you see as) frivolous projects by the State.
I was just using a similar argument, to show that they're both flawed.
In any number of ways, just as other types of scientific exploration are different from each other, and some seem to be worth spending billions on, and others are not. Do you have a more specific question?
I had this happen to me when I critiqued a YC backed company. Had a few thousand in 'meaningless internet karma points'.
You pretty soon realise after a few further comments anyway, so I doubt it's actually effective.
It's pretty mean spirited though - generally a "douchebag" move. It'd be like having a bad employee, but instead of firing him, or discussing his work, just don't bother paying him any more.
After being hellbanned I actually realised that commenting on internet forums is toxic, generally a waste of time, and not productive. So I quit. At the start, you sort of care about "karma". But you end up realising it's a measure of two things. 1. How much time you waste commenting on the internet, and 2. How much you can agree with the groupthink echo-chamber.
But for those that like spending time commenting, I would have thought following a subreddit model would work better here, with the growth. Spread the power out. If I get hellbanned from the "rust is the future!!!" subhackernews, big whoop.
It'd also help with filtering out all the non-interesting (self driving cars) stories.
But then perhaps it'd basically be reddit at that stage which would defeat the point...
Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. So they make new accounts and post linkless statements designed to be unanswerable.
We don't ban people because they "critiqued a YC backed company".
Edit: Some of the replies have made good points, and I realize that I overreacted. Sorry about that. Please shoot us an email at hn@ycombinator.com if you feel your account was banned unfairly. We're always happy to look into this—there's no question that we make mistakes; the most I can claim is that we're eager to, and do, correct them when they're brought to our attention.
* Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. *
When that kind of response comes from the site's moderator, I really don't see the level of toxicity improving any time soon.
It's likely statistically factual, but in context it's just another of the "mean, stupid things" that Paul Graham called you out as being here to address. And you appear to have done nothing to investigate whether the previous user's post was factually correct before slinging personal accusations.
If this gets me hellbanned too, so be it. Conversation and community on this site is a toxic mess that leaves people afraid to post anything. The main good thing is following users like patio11 and tptacek.
I'll go ahead and call Dan a friend, display my "not a shill for YC" bona fides, vouch for Dan as not a toxic person, and go on to criticize him for being so concerned about the appearance of toxicity that he's backing down on an issue he should stand his ground over. If he says HN moderation won't hellban someone for criticizing a YC company, take it to the bank.
I feel compelled to add: the accusation seems baseless. Over the several years I've been participating in these forums I cannot remember a single instance of anyone getting hellbanned or otherwise penalized just for criticizing a YC company.
You may be right. I'll look at the comment later and see if I should have written it differently. There's no time to reflect just now.
I try hard not to let personal irritation leak through in my HN comments, but I do fail at it. The most I can claim is a willingness to correct mistakes.
It's wildly inappropriate to lob a blanket accusation of fraud against every single person who has ever complained about your moderation.
People have wildly divergent views as to what's appropriate, what's a little rude, and what's over the line. This means that even if you really truly believe that there was NEVER a mistake made during moderation, that some people will truly believe what they said.
Good moderation requires a ton of empathy and kindness.
It's probably a lesson to me that the one time I didn't hedge by saying "almost" or something like that, someone objects to my "blanket accusation". Actually, I originally wrote "almost never" (or something similar). But then I realized I couldn't actually remember a case where someone provided a specific link to back up his or her grand claim of why they were banned. So in a fit of impetuousness I lopped off the "almost". I did leave in "nearly always", though.
> Good moderation requires a ton of empathy and kindness.
I try, but don't always succeed. Thanks for the reminder. I appreciate it.
I appreciate your willingness to see both sides and think of a good-faith interpretation here. That's the Principle of Charity which HN can use a lot more of. However, the users in question are typically quite accomplished at making throwaway accounts for specific purposes. Several have done so in this very thread.
There's no way, barring some freak outlier, that we banned anyone for criticizing YC or a YC-funded startup. If someone really did feel that way, nothing would be easier to clear up.
The real issue, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is repeatedly flouting the HN guidelines.
For what it's worth.. I don't even read that much, and I've not been here for that long, but I often was impressed by how much you actually do engage and do seem to care, a lot, to do right by everyone, in public. To say you lack empathy and kindness as a moderator in general would be just silly. I say this as someone who strongly dislikes hellbanning and even grey text (I still think slashdot nailed it with voluntary, customizable filtering), so you know I mean it :P
I disagree! (with your pre-edit, reading "It's not that you expressed yourself poorly").
That's exactly what happened here. (And maybe Daniel can edit his comment.)
Daniel does a really good job, and is extremely responsive by email and on here. It is obvious where he wrote "Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question?" is borne of deep frustration. He would like to follow those links and improve the site, but can't. It's obvious that his comment is written out of frustration.
Let's be very clear: hellbanning is the worst and rudest thing that exists on any respectable Internet forum. Hellbanning literally wastes hours of the time of people who contribute great insight for free. The comments on this site are good and provided for free by people. Hellbanning turns this goodwill on its face, like a goodwill jar you can put bills into but which go into a furnace.
Daniel (and PG) knows very well that hellbanning is a nuclear weapon and the rudest thing that any Internet forum can possibly do, that is actually being done.
You have stories of people only learning they were hellbanned after literally taking the time to email someone a link to something thoughtful they had written. A lot of hellbanning has been (historically) in error.
It is one of the main reasons that I would never consciously leave a comment up if it reaches -3, even if I stand by it 100%, it's important, and the community happens to be wrong in its groupthink and I clearly have explained why. I would delete it instead.
Note that I have learned this behavior, and so have other contributors on this site.
It's one of the things that makes this site great.
So even though it is a nuclear option and the worst, rudest thing that any respectable forum does, in the sense that time is money literally stealing from users, and stealing donations at that and throwing them away, at the same time it is one of the things that allows this site to function as one of the best sites on the planet.
So you can bet that Daniel is extremely serious about following hellbanning claims and improving this process. It is difficult and he walks a very fine line.
He's doing a fantastic job at present in a very difficult undertaking. Kudos, Daniel, and keep up the good work. I can read your comment for what it is :)
"It is one of the main reasons that I would never consciously leave a comment up if it reaches -3, even if I stand by it 100%, it's important, and the community happens to be wrong in its groupthink and I clearly have explained why. I would delete it instead."
I am confused. Your preferred path is to avoid conflict such that you would rather delete than be disagreed with? If your opinion differs from groupthink, you would make it go away? I guess that is similar to not posting in the first place (because of groupthink you disagree with) , just retroactive.
Probably better than my not posting in the first place :)
His point, one that I strongly agree with, is that the threat of being hellbanned for comments that get downvoted is enough to stifle discussion on HN. Honestly, how often do you see passionate debate in HN comments?
My interpretation is at least a disagreement about whether the technique is effective. If your attempt at improving the discussion looks more or less the same as whining about downvotes, it's going to get interpreted as whining about downvotes.
edit: I guess the thread was getting cluttered and argumentative.
> Good moderation requires a ton of empathy and kindness.
Which is sadly lacking among many, if not most, moderators of online communities across the net. I'm not saying that's the case with dang; in fact, I wouldn't know. But it's a thankless job that is akin to working in a call center without pay. It takes a strong personality to keep one's head above the layer of filth floating atop the waters of discourse.
I do know, and Dan has an enormous amount of empathy and kindness. But it is a hard job, it takes a toll, and I think this thread demonstrates how much he's willing to re-visit what he's said. (Even though I'm quite sympathetic to what Thomas said upthread.)
I agree with this, but I think it's worth noting that the prompt here was someone making a specific claim. One doesn't need to believe they have made no mistakes to be certain they've never made a particular mistake, and there's significantly less room for differences in interpretation (though that's not to say there's none).
If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. So they make new accounts and post statements designed to be unanswerable.
I interpreted that as dang attributing essentially every complaint to malice, and simultaneously dismissing all other explanations.
A misleading summary, since you're the one who introduced the idea of "malice" and "fraud". Dan's claim admits to HN users who believe they've been hellbanned for criticizing YC companies. Yours doesn't.
I don't even think that answer was even that bad, especially when compared to the parent. Here was a wild and personal accusation with no support at all, not even anecdotal, and pretty toxic itself.
Replying courteously even to baseless and ranty accusations is probably a good idea, but I can't say I'd blame someone for not doing it.
I see the mod(s?) deal with this kind of conspiracy accusation almost on a daily basis, and I can definitely see how patience can wear thin when every nut does that. Dang implying that this accusation was baseless was probably rash, but that's the only thing I see even remotely out of line here.
Moderation is a pretty thankless job, and like sysadmins, people never appreciate you for getting things to work right when they work right. The definition of success is invisibility to users. But the second it goes even a bit wrong, it's a shitstorm. Here's yet another piece of empathy that one needs to consider.
1) you ban people who are rude and who you disagree with philosophically, while you do NOT ban the equally rude people who you agree with.
For evidence of the above, look at users like etherael (and his other names; not sure if he tors/vpns or if you can find them), who are raging assholes on a semi-routine basis, but who aren't banned because Libertarian BitCoin Lover matches your values. And let's face facts, you're less willing to ban people who agree with you, even if they're toxic assholes.
If you banned people who you agreed with for the same exact crimes as those you disagree with HN would be a better place.
As it stands, people who agree with you are allowed to be ruder and more toxic than people who disagree with you. This is used as a game by some of HN's worst users who brag on IRC about how it's fun to try to engage in flamewars where they don't get banned but the other individual does.
edit:
Not to mention other game that's played by a lot of folks, which is to be as big of a dick as is possible without actually using openly aggressive language. The goal there being to generate an emotional reaction while retaining some semblance of plausible deniability, because everybody knows that you won't ban them for "polite" taunting, even if it's toxic shit that can't go anywhere useful or interesting.
The people who hold the opposite ideology believe fervently that HN is biased the other way (liberal, politically correct, socialist, etc., are some of the terms they use). I realize it's a bit facile to say "both sides claim bias therefore we must be doing something right". But for what it's worth, no, we don't consider ideology when banning people, we consider incivility.
> No offense kid, but you're fucking delusional. And HN is worse because of your inability to self-reflect.
Even if you had a point, you just lost it. Because when you present a point in this way with this kind of language and in this kind of behavior, you just lose everything.
I'm a pretty skeptical person (see my skepticism on my last comment, for example!) who views most actions by most companies very skeptically and tries to see if there might be ulterior motives. And I've gotta say, you're wrong in this instance.
> As to your claim that you aren't soft on Libertarians.
They're not (they're not soft/hard based on ideological beliefs). For example, DanielBMarkham, perhaps the most outspoken libertarian on this site, is rankbanned. Now, I do have serious doubts about whether or not they're "soft" on folks saying negative things about YC companies/people.
Lastly, I've gotten to know etherael quite well -- he's got a sharp tongue, but he never quite struck me as an asshole. I do know that he's very talented at what he does, and almost always provides good, intelligent conversation about anything I bring up to him - and in that way, fits right at home here on HN. I guess though maybe you caught him in a bad time being especially rude? The best of us lose it sometimes. I hope etherael is more thoughtful in his future replies.
Dan is a libertarian bitcoin lover? I've spent several hours in person talking to him. I'm a statist liberal Democrat who believes bitcoin is a ponzi scheme. He did not set off my spidey sense. I think you might be attributing generalized fears and frustrations onto specific people you don't know.
Being in the same ideological quadrant, I can say that I tend to get as many or more upvotes on political comments as on apolitical/tech-focused comments. And I tend to follow responses to my more contentious comments closely, and I have only very occasionally noticed even a single downvote on said comments.
I think there's a lot of outspoken libertarian/anti-statist types around here, and that's fine, but I don't think it's even the plurality among political stances of HN readers. I suspect being invested in politics to the point that you'll regularly engage in political discussions online is very strongly correlated with holding atypical political views (I include myself in that set).
The worst I ever do is respond rudely to people who have already attacked me, and even there I try to avoid doing so. As for using other names that's just flatly false, as is any gloating about baiting people into flamewars and laughing when they get banned. I haven't even used irc in over a year.
Basically I have no idea what you're talking about.
So on the topic of unfair bans and the new system, here is a useful way for you to both improve transparency and figure out for yourself if the new system is working.
Post a list of comments which were [dead]ed under the new system but would not have been [dead]ed under the old system.
If the list contains a bunch of comments like "u r a gay homoz", you'll make a pretty convincing case (both to yourself and everyone else) that the new system is awesome. If the list contains a bunch of "I'm concerned about the security implications of ordinary users putting significant money into bitcoin..." then maybe the new system isn't so awesome.
[edit: I realize it's probably too late for this to be seen, perils of posting from IST.]
>Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question?
>their claims are nearly always false.
>perennial sob story
Hmm, I wonder where these fall on Graham's disagreement pyramid...
Seriously, how hard is it to tell the guy "shoot me an email and I'll look into the ban" and then make your judgment after that? Maybe the guy's bullshitting us. Or maybe he really was banned unjustly. How can you possibly know?
That was before I started working on HN, so I don't have any inside details. But I'll give you my take on what I think happened, based on the time I did spend working with pg on the site. I need a few minutes though--there's another comment pending on my stack. Will come back and edit this.
(Edit: I haven't forgotten, but have to run out to an appointment, so this will need to wait for another hour or two. Sorry about that.)
Edit: back now. My gut feeling is that PG might not have had enough time to look into all the details. I say that because June 2012 was about the peak of when HN moderation was extremely time-constrained (I started a few months later) and the only option was to enforce the guidelines generically.
It's cool. I'm just curious about your take since, by necessity, you get to see far more comments than I do and get to see patterns that I may miss completely.
For the record, I don't think he deserved a hellbanning, but then again, this was a while ago. And the wild west hadn't probably settled yet.
I think you could, when Paul Graham was actively moderating the site, get hellbanned for unproductively pissing Paul Graham off. I think it happened more than once.
> The guidelines (as you probably already knew) also say that if you have a question about moderation, send us an email instead of posting about it on the site.
So it sounds like got banned for refusing to follow the guidelines?
Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com.
But in the places I have been banned, it's not been my fault. The people who say "we don't ban people because of X" are, like most people, just telling themselves a pleasant lie.
There's that one guy, who while never doing anything outrageously obnoxious, rubs you the wrong way. And eventually you're going to find something borderline or even milder than that, and use your petty powers. This is human nature, I'd almost certainly do the same. Everyone would.
Neither of your things in "quotes" are things that I said. The "shitty friend" was alexcap's own words. The phrase "think of, or care for, others" didn't show up in my comment at all.
I didn't call him a shitty friend. He wrote, "Now you’re probably thinking I’m a real shitty friend" after his explanation of the events — which I quoted, in quotes, very clearly a direct quote from his own words — and I wrote "Yes" to answer the question. 95% of my comment was advice for people on what to do in the situation that the friend is reaching out to them as that friend did, who got ignored and later died and that person didn't know for years.
If you write an essay about something you did that you think was bad, and post it to Medium, and post it to HN, and then say "You probably think I did something bad," is it reaaaally so controversial to comment with "Yes, I agree, I think you did something bad"?
Also, if you thought that was my last comment, maybe you don't see my actual last exchange? It was about my bootstrapping conference and upcoming web site. Perhaps it's truly hell banned as in not visible? It was this:
> "The phrase "think of, or care for, others" didn't show up in my comment"
It's a direct quote of a dead comment you wrote in a reply. Turn on "showdead" to see it [0].
The dead "think of" comment in the "shitty friend" thread appeared 405 days ago. Your comment about the bootstrapping conference was 406 days ago. (There's also a dead reply in the bootstrapping thread dated 405 days ago, which fits the timing of being hellbanned for the "think of" post.)
You call it the "shitty friend" thread is pretty inflammatory considering, again, that was the OP's own words (not mine). I turned on showdead and my dead comment that you're referring to sure looks reasoned and measured to me:
I never said anyone specific is self-centered. I said:
>How self-centered do you have to be to not even wish a friend with obvious health problems "good luck" or "feel better"?
That's a rhetorical question.
Then, in the dead comment, I wrote:
> Being a bad friend in this way doesn't make you a bad person…
> But it does make it seem kinda iffy to write a blog post about it, even include screenshots of the conversation, and not (apparently?) be socially aware enough to realize that the deceased man was nearly begging his friend to express some interest and concern. And so many of the commenters, from my perspective, were not picking up on anything the OP did not explicitly lay out in the essay itself, which is to say: his friend was telegraphing his problems in every possible way, and the OP ignored it. People seem to be reading it and thinking, "Oh, just one of those things." But it's only one of those things if you don't think of, or care for, others.
Again, I didn't personally attack alexcap. You are quoting it out of context.
Real inflammatory stuff. If this is what I got hellbanned for, it really makes me wonder about the actual, deliberate, specific, personal cruelty that goes by on a regular basis without banning.
Meanwhile the other dead comment… the one that's actually newest, not the one you claimed above was the newest… is about my bootstrapping conference and upcoming site:
> Oh, good question. I can see why you'd think that.
> Nope, BB will be more like HN, but specifically for bootstrappers and related topics only. IOW: public-facing, free to use. (Although I think we're going to do a MeFi-style $5 or $10 join fee, to encourage good citizenship.)
> It's not going to be a product. I'm not going to run it unilaterally, either. It's for the community.
That is the last thing I posted before being hellbanned.
I'm using "shitty friend" as a disambiguator -- whether they're your words or his, they act as a unique identifier. And I think your comments in that thread are the likely culprit. You seem to think what you wrote was reasoned and measured, but I can see why a moderator might read them and think "whoa, this is way too personal" and ban you. EDIT: remember, you know what you were thinking when you wrote it, but others might read the same words and take a different meaning. The words you used could have been interpreted as pretty inflammatory. (Again, I'm not defending the hellban as the right decision, just explaining that I see an obvious reason it may have happened. And yeah, I've seen people say worse who didn't happen to get hellbanned for it.)
Your other dead comment was probably posted after you were hellbanned (the point of a hellban is that you wouldn't have known it happened right away). That's why both comments are dead. If you'd been hellbanned for the last comment, only it would be dead.
No, being saucy is fine, and people much more disagreeable than you (cough) seem to thrive here. I can't see why you were banned, but I asked, because that's weird.
I think it's pretty complicated, actually. I've lurked here for years but only made an account within the last year. In that short time, I've said arguably worse things than you have (though not with ill intent; I can just be abrasive and opinionated) and as far as I can tell I've not been hellbanned yet.
It probably helps that I'm a "nobody"; I'm not a member of the startup culture, just an outside observer and occasional commentator. If it's true that politics are a factor in bans and heavy-handed moderation, then I can understand (though not agree with) you being hellbanned for what are fairly mild comments as judged by an outsider like me, as you are a member of the startup club.
And I hate to say it, but misogyny might even have played a role in it. I have zero evidence of that and it's not meant as an accusation, just that it's a remote possibility. It's a real problem in just about any internet based community, and I really doubt this one is immune to it.
You don't tell people why they've been banned at all, or even when they've been banned. Is it any wonder that conspiracy theories would arise around such a purposely opaque practice?
My experience comes from a different (IRL) context, but the type of people you need to moderate or ban are also often the type of people who will move right up to the edge of any bright line you draw, and use it is a shield for further antisocial behavior. Sometimes ambiguity is its own reward, especially when the lines are well-understood by most already.
As just one example I'm the resident "soldier" for the government (as one HN user was so nice to call me), I often post comments that are in opposition to many of the tenets that are popular on HN, and yet I've not been banned, my karma is not negative, and those I debate with generally treat me and my arguments with respect. If it were just up to ideology I should have been hellbanned by now, and yet here I am.
For what its worth, validity of the hellbanning aside, I do agree with the points he brought up re: emergent problems in scored boards. The karma system does tend to contribute heavily to the echo-chambery nature of many of these discussion forums; and while I certainly think HN is in a much better state than any others that come to mind, it's not immune. (Mentioning because to me, this point is far closer to home than the actual reason for the ban, yet often seems to go without effective discussion of possible remediation.)
Maybe sorting options would help? I'd prefer to sort responses by time (and maybe some javascript to mark new comments since last visit on the page, but I dream..), or even sorted randomly because why not. Maybe serve that from a static cache that only gets refreshed every 5 minutes or so? I would still use it, gladly.
I think account-level filters might alleviate a number of problems users tend to complain about here.
Just imagine how useful people might find it to simply block posts by keyword, or not show threads with a certain ratio of upvotes to downvotes, or be able to train their own Bayesian filter.
They wouldn't even have to change the UI (which they seem to not want to do) apart from what a particular user sees.
The filters would get very complex very fast though, I imagine. The symptoms of "echo-chamber-itis" are as varied as the humans that exibit them. Sometimes it's aggressive downvoting of an idea that doesn't align with the status quo despite validity for discussion, sometimes it's aggressive upvoting of an idea that aligns better, sometimes it's an aggressive amount of churn as various subgroups battle for "placing" the item, which results in the item being read as a net 0. (I'm being very hand wavy and referring to patterns I see broader than just HN; before anyone starts jumping up and down about how the HN algorithms avoid any specific problem I mention :P )
You're probably right - even though I think people do want their own bubbles, attempting to provide them might just result in more complaints when the filters inevitably fail.
Then again, there does appear to be a confligt in the way the HN community seems to be growing, with the site itself still geared towards providing a relatively low amount of content through a single channel. Stories overwhelming the site and reposts are a known problem, and probably almost no one bothers watching past the first page of /news so those top 30 slots might as well be the entire site. Although, many of the most obvious remedies to this would make the site look more like reddit, and we can't have that I guess.
Ohai, I've been hell-banned and don't know why. I guess as someone successfully running a software business _and_ being a well-known open source person I have to place in a forum for people who want to run successful internet businesses and are into tech.
Maybe you don't personally, maybe you don't as a group anymore.
As I suggested in my original post though, I have more useful things to do than look back at comments I posted years ago and compile evidence. I've moved on.
I'm sure it happens a lot more often than you realise, because in general when people get hellbanned, they come to the same realisations as me.
Not only did we never ban people for criticizing YC companies, the very first thing PG told me when I started moderating HN, and the thing that he emphasized most strongly after that, was never to do things that could be construed (or misconstrued) as censorship of anti-YC stories.
(I've edited out some irritation that leaked through in my original version of this comment.)
dang, I think HN has improved for the better, especially since some effort has been made to make things more transparent.
But it would be despicably dishonest for you guys to deny that routinely you guys do things here to protect YC companies (including manipulating voting points on comments/ submissions).
Even though Skeletor made that comment like ... 20 days after the HN submission, it somehow found its way to the top. Obviously, this was through manual action. Obviously, a non-YC company is not afforded such a privilege.
Idling in #startups of freenode (unofficial HN channel), I've heard too many of these stories. The stories of rankban upon some critical comment on a YC-funded company, a slowban because of a critical comment on some YC personality, etc. etc. There are countless examples.
When these things happen one after the other, you lose trust, we cannot believe you anymore. Please stop doing this. I think the only way to win trust back at this point is if you again expose voting points at all times.
I'm glad that you agree that HN has been getting better. We obviously have a way to go to win you over, but challenge accepted, we're absolutely willing to try.
It isn't hard to deny that general impression you're reporting, because it isn't true. But I don't see any way to refute such a sweeping claim convincingly. As far as I can tell it exists only on the level of rumor and is unanswerable. But I'm happy to reply about specific cases.
In the Drchrono case, we got an email from the founder asking to post a response after the commenting window had closed. I agreed, but not because this was a YC startup, but rather because we would do this for any startup in this situation, and have indeed done so for at least one non-YC startup I can remember. Before I agreed to the Drchrono founder's request, I told him I needed to make sure that we would do it for any startup in that situation, and I thought long and hard before concluding that was true. It was by far the most important factor in that decision.
Consider that the post was killed by moderators, then brought back alive, then drchrono individuals made a comment, and then that comment was shot up. There were a slew of submissions crying out "censorship" this day and they were all similarly killed. I can recall like 20 such instances of similar happenings involving YC-funded startups, and having a similar situation around them. So, honestly, dang, the plausibility of the chain of events you've listed from your side in this specific instance is tenuous at best, and unfortunately again, dishonest and deceitful at worst. But I'm going to suspend my tingly senses and give you the benefit of doubt at this moment, and not go on any further about this particular issue.
dang, I understand that you, in your position, have to be mindful of optics, you have to think of ways to say things that are best for YC. That's great, you should do that. All individuals of a company who have a public presence have to do that. The thing is, you must not focus entirely on optics -- you absolutely must in your heart have the right view. Not only because if you don't, some people will eventually find out what's up, but also because it's the right thing. Actions that favor YC companies (beyond a certain line) on a public forum such as HN are unethical. I think there have been enough things done at this point that the only way that trust can again be restored is by having more transparency -- for example, by showing comment scores at all times in some way.
This is an unsolvable problem. As good a job as you're doing, YC is the sponsor of HN and just because of that there will always be this perception. The only way to get rid of this issue would be to completely divorce YC and HN, something that may for a variety of reasons not be possible and for a whole pile of other reasons not be desirable.
You're doing an absolutely super job, probably far better than most or all of us here will ever realize simply because moderation when done properly is all but invisible so don't sweat it, this is a thing that is as far as I can see not solvable in the current set-up. Those lines were drawn long before you showed up and within those lines you're doing the best you can.
FWIW I too recall several instances of users that were banned imho unjustly as well as some threads where the pro-YC bias broke through but over the vast amount of content generated here those are very very few instances, not by far enough to claim systematic bias or to be used as evidence for some nefarious plot. More like genuine mistakes and things done in the heat of the moment. And on later reflection some of those were reverted.
(If you want I can probably dig them up for you but you're busy enough as it is.)
Skeletor's comment is a first-party report of the eventual resolution of the issue. It's the most substantive top-level comment on the page, so it belongs at the top.
We want to see such comments highly ranked regardless of YC affiliation. If you post such an important update and don't get organic upvotes because the story is old, plead your case to hn@ycombinator.com.
IF someone is a genuine troll, then hell-banning is a great way of dealing with it, because it maximizes the time wasted by the troll and minimizes the time used by the moderator.
However, if the person isn't actually out-and-out to mess with your site, it sucks. I've seen lots of communities go down the tubes because the moderators get busy with life, and then Something Happens On The Forum, and moderators passive-aggressively go "fine, we're just gonna act like this, and if you don't want us to do that, then you should make the community act better!" Basically announcing that they are going to put in minimal effort to moderation, and the community definitely notices.
Professional moderation, like HN uses, seems like the best way to go.
Indeed, it's a situation where the needs of the many (HN community as a whole) outweigh the needs of the few (banned non-troll commentators). The danger lies in becoming such an elite, closed group due to blind moderation and banning even the most innocent members over a perceived slight, that the moderators themselves end up the trolls of what is left of the community.
For example, there's a certain GNU/Linux distro that is maintained by a core group of devs who have become overtly hostile to any new users of their project, and actively seek to discourage "newbies" from seeking help and getting any benefit out of the project. One would think the toxic atmosphere would have killed the distro off long ago, yet it's maintaining popularity and even seeing an uptick in a certain niche community. I certainly don't understand how it thrives with such a rotten core; yes, it's overall a very well done distro, but even the best product normally can't survive that kind of cancer.
That's not to say that HN would ever end up like that; indeed, from what I've seen they are doing an excellent job overall with maintaining and moderating this community. I just hope it continues to stay that way or improve, instead of going down a dark path towards chaos.
"... After being hellbanned I actually realised that commenting on internet forums is toxic, generally a waste of time, and not productive. So I quit. ..."
Yes.
... But for those that like spending time commenting, I would have thought following a subreddit model would work better here, with the growth. Spread the power out. ..."
It's little different than pre-internet communities. I mean, we paint this adorable picture of small-town life from some previous golden era, in movies and in books, and even in the stories of your great-grandparents.
But people are assholes. And they found a few people they didn't like (for good reasons, for bad reasons, for none at all) and did the meatspace equivalent of hellbanishment.
Yeh, here, you're just wasting time on the internet, maybe you can stop caring about it. But people do this the world over, and there's no escaping it. This is what people do. They're mean fucks, and if you don't fit in, you're just left out in the cold.
My account segmond got hell banned, it's a miracle that this is not. HN will downvote any comment that they don't like down to hell. An opinion that is disagreeable with is flagged, it's like the opposite of facebook like button. Dislike.
You don't have to spam or be disruptive. I'm putting my account name on here so folks can look at it. I was new to HN, didn't know much, had no idea I was dead. :)
This account get's a decent amount of flag too when I make unpopular opinion, I have to stop myself from censoring myself because the moment I feel like I can't talk or participate, I will just leave the community. If I can't express myself around a bunch of "hackers" then what's the point?
I'm sure I'll get downvoted to hell for this, but why should my money be funding this? Sorry, but it has no benefit whatsoever.
edit: Instead of downvoting a dissenting voice, why not argue your case - why should taxpayers fund space toys?
edit2: Well, looks like I'm banned from commenting. Good job dealing with those that don't agree with you...