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Re:Half Blamed the EU for Their Problems, Blame Facebook for... by jff on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @03:15PM (#12003964)
I thought you'd end up "dead" (hellbanned) if you get consistently voted down to negative scores. I don't know a lot about actual mechanisms of how karma and voting work on this site, though, so if I'm wrong about that I apologize and retract the "hellbanned" part of my earlier comment.
Re:Half Blamed the EU for Their Problems, Blame Facebook for... by tptacek on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @03:18PM (#12003992)
No, that's not at all how it works.

"Hellbanning" is a form of banning where the site takes steps to avoid tipping you off that you've been banned. It's ostensibly a defense against spammers and trolls, who will create new accounts after being banned.

For the past couple years, bans on HN are announced publicly. They're not automatic; the moderators do it directly. It's not based on your karma.

Re:Half Blamed the EU for Their Problems, Blame Facebook for... by dang on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @03:23PM (#12004060)
> bans on HN are announced publicly

For the most part. We don't do so for spammers or (sometimes) serial trolls.

Re:Half Blamed the EU for Their Problems, Blame Facebook for... by vox_mollis on Thursday June 30, 2016 @05:51PM (#12012075)
Hellbanning exists in a subtler form, though. For instance, my account.

Top-level comments that are literally seconds old are typically posted about 2/3 down the page. None of my votes appear to actually count. It's been this way for several months.

I'm used to it, but it's still very annoying and I wish HN would actually acknowledge they do this.