I would like to see a solution that addresses this issue too. Perhaps something like http://news.ycombinator.com/classic but instead of users who have been on HN for a year, you pick the users. Some AI programmers might suggest that HN itself could figure out what users typically upvote the same content as you -- no thanks, I can pick them out myself.

A tag/keyword system would be ideal but that's a lot of work and tags never seem to turn out as good as they sound.

(also, `larrys`, you died yesterday -- hellbanned, and looking at your comment history yesterday, seems like an entirely inappropriate response from the mods)

Where are you seeing `larrys`? The guy you're replying to doesn't seem to be "larrys", and when I looked at larrys profile here on HN I can see there was some recent arguing, but nothing that I would think would merit a ban, and additionally, I don't see a 'inappropriate response from the mods' (but perhaps I'm not sure what to look for; do mods get special CSS styling or anything?). I'm confusered.

You can't reply directly to hellbanned users, so a lot of people reply to the person such a user was replying to, to try to send them a message that they've been banned.

Most users won't see these comments/users. If you go to your user page, you'll see an option called "showdead". Enable that ('Yes'), and you'll see these messages.

Thanks! That clears things up.

Also, his complaint about speed is likely because he is slowbanned in addition to being hellbanned. It seems pretty clear there are moderators inappropriately hellbanning users for personal gripes.

Hellbanning is an unnecessarily hurtful and cowardly way to deal with people other than outright trolls.

How do you know that someone else has been banned? How do you know if YOU have? What's "hellbanned"? What's "shadow banned"?

You can look them up (the terms that is, not the users), but here's a good start:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...

I think they're the same (or at least similar), and basically you're invisible to everyone but yourself.

This is a 'safer' form of banning, as someone who is outright banned would notice right away and might try to get revenge in some way. But, if everything works just like always and they don't realize they're banned, then they won't get upset (and won't raise hell).

Or a modified version of the follow model would be interesting.

>hellbanned, and looking at your comment history yesterday, seems like an entirely inappropriate response from the mods)

Isn't that normally the case here? I've seen more people shadow banned for seemingly no reason than I've seen shadow banned for a legit reason. The whole point of shadow bans is supposed to be to waste the time of obvious trolls, here it is used randomly and seemingly as the only response to any perceived misbehaviour, so whatever wrong-doing is perceived never gets corrected, people just make a new account and continue as before. By far the most baffling and absurd aspect of HN.

Any discussion of the hellban procedure seems a quick way to be hellbanned.

It's a horrible, unjust, arbitrary system and is generally abused by anonymous, seemingly petty moderators.

My main account was hellbanned (also slowbanned, and my IP address banned) for apparently replying to the wrong mystery moderator with something he/she didn't like.

Hellbanning on HN is sorely in need of oversight and reconsideration. Hellbanning should be used only for obvious trolls. There are other ways to punish and train bad behavior from legitimate contributors.

> Any discussion of the hellban procedure seems a quick way to be hellbanned.

I haven't noticed this? I posted a few critiques on hellbanning over the past few weeks and since most of them got some upvotes, I assume I did not incur any mod wrath ;)

I was gonna say, maybe I've gathered sufficient points to get away with more, but then I took a look at larrys user profile page (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=larrys) and he has accumulated nearly thrice my score.

That's good. There's already sufficient naturally occurring social pressure that lets older accounts get away with more, no need to inflate the effect based on karma.

In larrys' case, I can't see anything that's remotely offensive in his last few comments, so I'm going to assume good faith and guess that the actual offending comment probably got removed entirely.

It's a shame we have to guess about these things though. Wouldn't it be trivial for moderators to leave a note about their reasons? Very short and to-the-point, like a Wikipedia edit-summary. It wouldn't even require extra code to start with, they can just edit it into the relevant post. I've seen very large blog-type forums work that way. It merely requires moderators to decide and agree to do it that way.

> There are other ways to punish and train bad behavior from legitimate contributors.

Yes. Problem is that while it does punish (in some sense), in no sense does it "train" the affected users, because there's no telling when/if they will notice the punishment, it could be many months, and even if by then the user takes the trouble to figure out what post caused this sanction, the complete lack in immediacy of consequence entirely negates any effectiveness in behavioural change (see: Operant Conditioning, there's a lot of research that is directly applicable to online community moderation).

I've been hellbanned twice.

Were you restored or did you open a new account?

I stopped using "sbierwagen" when my flag button was removed, and my downvote button disabled. (The second one turns out to be temporary-- just don't downvote so many people)

The next two accounts, being of fairly low karma and recently made, got hellbanned within a couple months, for saying things "sbierwagen" could easily get away with.

I really really wish there were a filter so that users could eliminate all HN from aggregation sources (read wired, extremetech, etc).

Wouldn't that be relatively easy to do client-side as a bookmarklet or GreaseMonkey script?

(And yes, that's a challenge, lazyweb!)

> I get enough of the former on Reddit; I come to Hacker News for the latter.

I subscribe to a lot of tiny subreddits on specific computing and math related topics that I'm interested in--they may be (very) low traffic, but things that may not get many upvotes in /r/programming, get reposted in those places, so they still show up on my personal frontpage. The discussions there also tend to have hardly any "memes" (because that's only fun if you know hundreds will read it).

I do agree that Hacker News has even more "meat" hidden away in this manner. I recently re-discovered this, at some point I had changed my HN bookmark to /best and saw only the top-voted links. Recently I've been peeking at the regular feed and indeed there's loads of quality posts that "only" get a few tens of upvotes and therefore not even show on /best, but are definitely worth reading.

Do many people actually read HN/newest? I suppose they must, how would new posts get their first upvotes otherwise :) But it moves so fast, and it has a lot of (blog)spam last time I looked? Why'd you go there if the regular feed has so much better quality links, except of course out of some sense of "duty" maybe?

True, possibly because articles of value are very specific, in which not everyone can relate to or retain anything of value. What might be your domain expertise, I might have no interest in, or don't have the background to comprehend, and vice versa. Thus, the "least common denominator" tends to float up.

edit: there doesn't seem to be an "under" call for the karma number, it might be fun to troll the submissions with less love...

Exactly my thougth. Most of the time I prefer the mid-upper range while excluding the highly voted.

Now all I want is this: http://news.ycombinator.com/under?points=55