I do think a warning system would be better in many cases. Many people get banned wrongly, and I think uriel was one of those. This is not to say that the system is perfect. You might wish for people to be able to belligerently proclaim any offensive opinion they might hold, but this isn't your site or mine, and PG is within his rights doing what he thinks is necessary to keep the conversation quality at a high level.
"Apple is going to fail but you don't see it because you are Tim Cook's gay lover"). losethos' weird Christian ramblings), or just being very rude about your unpopular opinion (e.g. "women are inferior"), trying to shove your opinion down people's throats to the detriment of the site overall (e.g.
It's not just "straying outside the hive" or "failing to toe the party line" - much of the time, it's expressing offensive opinions (e.g. The other problem is, it doesn't even notify them that they did something wrong! It's not even a slap on the wrist, they don't notice! It's just stupid.Īnd in the mean time, a determined troll occasionally checks if they can still see their account's comments via a proxy, and if they cannot, they simply register a new account, just as if they were banned via a regular ban.Īmy Hoy and Thomas Ptacek strongly disagree with both the majority here and Paul Graham himself all the time, yet they aren't hellbanned. Yes it's usually something very stupid, something that deserves all the downvotes it can get, perhaps some of it might warrant a regular ban,īut I have NEVER seen ANY hellbanned user saying something so utterly reprehensible that it would warrant wasting someone's time for over a year that they spent writing comments on HN. Often I have to guess, what is their most downvoted comment from just before the time their comments turn grey. When I see such a case, I browse back in their comment history to see what infraction caused their hellban. Some of those comments are really thoughtful, as well. They can't see they're hellbanned, I've seen some of the poor sods keep on writing comments (that people who did not switch on "show dead" cannot see) for over a year. However when these are not full-time trolls, it becomes really sad to see how it wastes a lot of smart people's time. Sometimes for little reasons, sometimes they did earn some punishment for ill intentions.
Regular users, however, since the mods are not infallible (instead, on HN they are for some ill-thought-out reason invisible and unaccountable), sometimes also get caught in this. So for that troll, a hellban differs none from a regular ban.
To me the concept of hellbanning always seemed like a real nasty practical joke, something you'd specifically code as a one-off to temporarily trick your worst, most persistent long-time troll.Īs you use it as a punishment method on everyone, it becomes less effective on actual trolls (compared to regular bans), because a determined troll knows its environment, and knows to occasionally check their account via other means to see if it's been hellbanned. And there are a whole lot of things it makes worse. There is nothing that hellbanning (the way it's doled out on HN) solves better than regular bans, suspensions or warnings. Hellbanning, as opposed to regular banning, a warning system or suspensions, is counterproductive, a giant waste of people's time and frankly condescending towards the userbase. That's right, if you were hellbanned, you wouldn't know. You do understand what hellbanning is, right? It means hiding their posts from everyone but them. > Hellbanning is necessary to keep the trolls out.
The decline of free speech has come not from any single blow but rather from thousands of paper cuts of well-intentioned exceptions designed to maintain social harmony." While most people still enjoy considerable freedom of expression, this right, once a near-absolute, has become less defined and less dependable for those espousing controversial social, political or religious views. "Free speech is dying in the Western world. Which reminds me of the 3rd most popular article on HN today: I propose we call those "hell-banning" provoking arguments, "thought crimes". No need for discussion or argumentation any more on this front, except to agree with each other. In issues where most HN people agree, you should not dissent, because we have already reached the absolute enlightenment and correct opinion on things such as "sexism". One should not be allowed to divert from popular opinion (be it popular in society in general, in some conservative circle, or merely popular within the hip crowd), even if he is not being trollish and is providing arguments about it.
Yes, because "free speech" is nice and all, but there are some opinions that you should not have, even on a liberal place like Hacker News.