HN Explorer

Why Is This Person Not [Shadow] Banned?

8 points by Normille ↗ HN
OK. I don't want to be the playground snitch, telling tales on other people here. But considering I've had HN accounts shadow-banned into oblivion in the past, just for making a single off-the-cuff remark that was deemed out of order, how come this person seems to be able to abuse the site with impunity, on an ongoing basis?

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=omiossec

Day after day, I see multiple posts fron this person [or bot?], every single one of which is spamming one of the same two websites and every single one of which has been flagged to death. Yet still they're allowed to carry on.

Genuinely curious.

18 comments

[ 14.2 ms ] story [ 53.7 ms ] thread
anigbrowl
I have wondered about this too, for months. More transparency would be nice.
Normille
One thing lobste.rs gets right
gkbrk
Wow! The submission list for that account looks like an RSS feed for Microsoft stuff. Either a novice marketer from Microsoft, a huge Microsoft fan, or someone trying to farm karma without understanding the demographics of HN.
quickthrower2
Looks like they are banned now. I think submissions are less likely to get you banned than comments, probably I am guessing because submissions are more ignorable whereas a comment is in someone’s face by default, so gets more scrutiny
[dead] rolph
did a websearch for omiossec, apparently [redacted]

start complaining here too.

https://github.com/omiossec

dang
No no no, please don't go into personal attack on HN, and particularly please don't bring in someone's personal details as ammunition against them. The damage it does to the community is not worth whatever else it might achieve, and we don't want the online shaming culture to rule here.

Besides, people are often simply unaware that they were breaking rules or conventions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(I've redacted a name from the parent comment.)

rolph
the details are right in the about page of that particular poster for all to see, and HN isnt the only place that was getting spammed, probably a script that was/is a little bit too loose on frequency of postings
dang
Yes, but there's an enormous difference between information lying somewhere passively and copying it into an HN thread to rile indignation against someone.
rolph
to rile indignation is a false assumtion, it is somewhat pointless to comment/complain on HN, rather than go to the source and let them know thier actions are concerning.

the source in question has a somewhat expansive web presence, and activity, in any event thread is dead, and good thing too.

dang
Ok, I believe you about intent. From a moderation perspective we can only judge these things by the effects they tend to have. Copying someone's personal name into a thread that's already simmering against them is a trope of the online rage culture. If you do something like that and your intent is not the default, the burden is on you to disambiguate your intent.

I wrote a longer explanation about this in a different context yesterday, in case it's helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25435283.

rolph
thanx dang, have a good day/night where ever your clock is.
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(comment deleted)
dang
Your question contains a false assumption. What made you think the account wasn't banned?

You guys all must have 'showdead' turned on in your profiles to even be seeing those submissions. The way HN works is: if you want to see all the things that software or moderators or user flags kill, you can do that by switching on 'showdead'. Conversely, if you've switched on 'showdead', then you're going to see all the posts that were killed. That's not people "abusing the site with impunity", that's you asking to be shown whatever abuse is out there.

(Also, the site guidelines ask you not to post like this, but rather to email hn@ycombinator.com. Can you please review them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Normille
Ah. that'll be it. I do have 'Showdead' ticked.

While you're on this thread? What exactly are the guidelines for what gets flagged an ultimately killed? As well as the many patently obvious spam articles and snake oil adverts which show as 'dead' I see a fair few 'dead' submissions which look like completely legitimate articles the HN demographic would be interested in.

In fact that's one of the reasons I leave 'Showdead' ticked. Just because what gets an article killed seems so arbitrary at times. And I don't want to miss something that might be genuinely interesting.

dang
It's a lot more complicated behind the scenes than it probably looks like up front. For example, one reason why a good-seeming article might be killed is if the site is banned because of past abuses. But for cases like that, vouching is good.

Beyond that I'd need to see specific links to say anything meaningful.

Normille
OK. Here are just three I spot at the moment from the first 2 or 3 pages I see, when browsing the site by the /new sorting:

1: [dead] Protect your S3 buckets from breaches (mklein.io) [0]

2: [dead] The NSA just released the preview version of Ghidra Debugger on GitHub (github.com/nationalsecurityagency) [1]

3: [dead] How to Write a Terminal Multiplexer with Rust, Async, and Actors – Part 2 (hashnode.dev) [2]

I'm not saying any of those is a fantastic article, or one that particularly interests me. But I can't see anything particularly 'wrong' with them in an abusive, spammy or 'irrelevant to HN's readership' sense. And, as I said before, there are usually at least one or two such submissions, which seem to have been killed for no apparent reason, on every page when browsing by '/new'.

Interesting you should say there's more complicated filtering going on behind the scenes because, from this side of the wizard's curtain, it does often look arbitrary, almost like people are flagging stories for personal reasons other than completely objective ones. And, as I said previously, one of the reasons I had turned 'showdead' on.

[0] https://mklein.io/2020/12/17/protect-against-s3-breaches/

[1] https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/tree/debugg...

[2] https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/tree/debugg...

Normille
PS: I know I bang on about this all the time. But it would be nice if there was some kind of filtering on HN that blocked people endlessly posting the same stories over and over again. Here are today's entrants for "Keyboard Headbutter of the Week":

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Lots of forum software will pre-scan what you are about to post for keywords and ask "Your topic seems similar to these <list of posts>. Are you sure you want to create a new topic?"

It would be good if HN would do the same.

Mind you, given that so many people obviously think that; 12 or more hours after a major HN-flavoured story broke it's not worth checking to see if anyone already submitted it, before submitting it themselves --they'd probably still headbutt that Submit button anyway.