You see them because you've selected "showdead" on your profile page. They are dead because the person exhibited a lack of understanding of the mores of the community, and either posted spam, or egregiously violated common courtesy in comments.
Sometimes, I imagine, users may get auto killed prematurely; if their first submission appears to be obvious spam, for example. But, I wouldn't think that would happen often.
Notice his comment 51 days ago that led to the autobanning. This wasn't just a random act of vitriol: there was something that led to the ban happening.
PG said before that his solution with fighting trolls and spammers is to make it impossible for them to see that they're being killed. That way, unlike banning, they don't make new accounts.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 32.7 ms ] threadSometimes, I imagine, users may get auto killed prematurely; if their first submission appears to be obvious spam, for example. But, I wouldn't think that would happen often.
If the site has a honeypot system that shows the autodeleted comments only to the user that made them, that's clever, if a little much.
If it just instantly deletes them, that's lame, it'd be better just to ban him.
If this is being done by a moderator manually, that's fucking awful, and the moderator should be banned.
PG said before that his solution with fighting trolls and spammers is to make it impossible for them to see that they're being killed. That way, unlike banning, they don't make new accounts.
It's a little obvious once he's troll'ed you though. Instead of the banhammer, there's a programmatic 25sec delay to load any page on HN.
Pretty sure it's done by the admin by hand, too. PH33R!!1