HN Explorer

Poll: How do you feel about the number of hellbans?

4 points by kgermino ↗ HN
Over the past 6 months or so it has felt like more accounts are getting hellbanned. I know a there is at least a vocal minority who feel that this has gotten excessive ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4827922 ). I'm looking for a rough sense of how popular this view is.

Overall:

7 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 28.3 ms ] thread
Benferhat
I'm still wondering why you haven't been hellbanned yet.
z_
What is a hellban?
kgermino
Basically a users comments and submissions are automatically killed (you can see them by turning on 'showdead' in your profile) to everyone but the user.

It's a very useful technique for fighting spam and trolls because it hides their activity from the rest of the site, yet they don't know that there is a problem so they don't work around it or create a new account.

The HN mods like to use hellbans on trolls, however it can sometimes be hard to distinguish a troll from a misguided or obnoxious user. Also, sometimes an otherwise good user will have a thread where they come off as trolling for one reason or another. In these cases it can be hard to know whether a user should be banned or not.

brudgers
I am not of the mindset that HN should be a democracy.

If it serves the explicit and implicit goals of HN, I don't find issue with hellbanning.

kgermino
I tend to agree, usually when I see these polls I think of them as feeling out the community's opinion rather then 'let's take a vote and pressure pg to follow the result'

Especially since I think pg doesn't particularly care about most people's opinion on this (nor should he)

brudgers
I don't think meta discussion of HN mechanics is typically productive or helpful, because the mechanics are not controllable by those discussing it, e.g. displaying comment scores.
kgermino
That's fair.

I guess my counter argument would be that it's a problem when meta on a different thread, or when there are more than 1 or 2 meta threads a week. Otherwise they are easy to avoid and infrequent enough that meta threads don't crowd out more legitimate ones.