Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us
I realize they were killed off for a reason, and I realize that moderating is a tedious pain and a real chore, but it makes me feel sad to see that people who have taken the time to enter a good comment in good faith, will never have it seen. It leads me to wonder if their death wasn't a mistake.
And it makes me feel lessened to participate in that.
I wonder if it might be more fair to our undead to either inform them of their ban after a time, to resurrect them after a time, or to give to the rest of us with show dead set a way to give them a resurrection upvote. To indicate they seem to be participating in good faith, and allow a way bring them back to life after enough some period of time.
Anyway, it's not often we can bring the dead back to life, ....
101 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadLeave them dead but let us vote up the good comments and "undead" just those that are deemed by the community to be relevant or insightful (I won't recommend how many up-votes that should take).
When I first joined, I commented for a few weeks and then stumbled into a conversation that involved Steve Jobs and poaching employees. The top comment was talking about how greedy Jobs was and I replied pointing out that he had taken $1 in salary and no stocks for several years. I wasn't totally clear in my first comment and by the time I got done explaining, I was ghost banned. From a single comment.
I went on for a while and out of spite, I kept posting replies even though I knew they wouldn't be viewed. A few people messaged me on other channels to let me know. I'm not sure what the solution is here, but that experience wasn't fun.
Also, look at which down-voters are subject to the most appeals might indicate who's being vindictive.
In my experiences the people in charge of making these decisions are fairly prudent.
"A few people messaged me on other channels to let me know."
I may not have remembered everything perfectly, but there you go.
(But for the most part, no one reads the comments of the dead.)
edit: Also, if you get so many upvotes on your comments, say 20, you are automatically un-shadow-banned.
I also suggest that un-shadow-banning should not be automated. Enough upvotes over time could trigger a "review this account" e-mail, but it should still be up to a moderator to look over the account and give the final say.
HN seems to be pretty good about letting people know that they're banned, either by email or in threads. It's probably a good idea to check their comment history before letting them know.
jere's comment is disturbing. I tend to stay away from some hotbutton topics now, and anything involving certain companies involves weird voting (both up and down). That's a great shame on a site like HN.
I eventually got the ban lifted, but only after writing HN and asking them to do it. I never got any notice that I'd been banned, or really any rational explanation about what I'd done to cause the ban, either by email or in a thread, from HN admins or anyone else. My profile has both an email address and a link to an "About Me" page with my contact information on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., so it's not like I'm hard to find.
Even though the ban eventually got lifted, it really knocked my opinion of this community down a few notches. Passive-aggressive measures like hell-banning/shadow-banning/etc. should be last resorts used for silencing hard-core trolls. If they're used too widely, they break down the trust a community needs to have in its mods to function properly.
I understand that the HN mods don't want to have to explain every action, and when someone really deserves a partial or full ban they don't want to announce it and cause the person to just evade it. I've been in the position of moderating several forums (none quite this big) and I know it's difficult to keep out the trolls and keep false positives low. But the false positive rate on HN seems very high to me. Some of these methods seem to be too widely used on too many good contributors with too little explanation, and as you say, that breaks down the trust the community needs.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847829
Eventually my posts were given legibility but the experience lessened my respect for this community, as my offending comment had to do with American fascism (pre Snowden revelations) but now I try not to "grind my axe" here when I'm downvoted.
I have seen that some users here will downvote certain others regardless of the content of their posts and this practice is unbecoming of rational individuals. Apparently the powers-that-be notice this also, as I have regained some of my lost status, and some of my posts still receive upvotes, so I'd say that the moderation of this site is working as is.
The funny part is I didn't have contact info. I only added it to this account a few weeks ago. Some charitable person decided to google my username and found one of my accounts on another site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button
That said, I mostly just upvote interesting comments and ignore the rest.
I had intended to release this spreadsheet to the HN community, but it really was not at all comprehensive, and I forgot about it over time. Perhaps if members here would volunteer to maintain a list of such cases.. We don't need PG to implement anything then, every week he could just be sent a list of users that ought to be unbanned.
In my case I knew I was hellbanned almost immediately because generally when I contributed to a discussion here I got responses and received upvotes. It didn't take long to figure out what had happened. I know, and knew, that I can appeal via email but I didn't for two reasons: 1. accusations of misogyny (which my banning effectively was) are a death sentence with no chance of appeal anyway, around here, and 2. I decided that HN was missing out nearly as much or more than I was by my hellbanning. I have lurked, though I do visit here less than before, and I have not registered another account. There's been a few threads I would have liked to participate in, especially recently with the USG spying, but for the most part I don't miss it.
Please do not reconsider my banning. I shall wear it as a badge of honor.
Edit: And for those who don't know, there is another thing mods can do to accounts here, which will make HN very slow to respond when logged in to that account. I got that too. Almost forgot until I logged in to post this :-)
Not sure what happened.
Felt like a jackass when I found out. Humans become evil when given authority over others.
Anyway, I understand the reasoning behind the current system (HN is a huge target for potential spammers), but it really does create a climate of fear. Unfortunately I don't have a solution to this.
in fact, are you sure you were banned? apart from the last comment, which might have been deleted, it doesn't seem to me like you were hellbanned. your other comments are not greyed out.