Yeah, I had an account hellbanned here for over a year before someone finally told me. There's no way to find if someone replies to you on this forum so I rarely went back and checked if anyone replied to me, but it still bothered me that the admins would find it acceptable to let someone waste their time over an entire year without telling them their account is useless. Not to mention the additional 10-15 seconds of latency opening every page on the forum.

I use http://hnnotify.com/ to get the replies to my comments. It's pretty useful.

Find out if people replied to you at https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=consz

HN randomly takes about 10 seconds to load for me though I've never made an account here. In case my IP was slowbanned, can someone reply to this comment?

Sometimes HN is just slow. Last I heard, it's running in a custom server in a custom Lisp language on a single core of one server.

You're perfectly visible.

That's roughly what my experience with reddit was like. All of my posts sat on 1 point, all of my threads would get downvoted to zero and disappear.

HN uses hellbanning? Neat.

You can actually toggle the visibility of posts from hellbanned users. Under your account settings, turn on 'showdead'.

I leave it turned on, because while hellbanned users don't often contribute a lot, many of their posts are still interesting.

For example, take losethos, who is afflicted with schizophrenia and writes his own operating systems so he can make music with God. (You'll have to turn on showdead to see his comments): http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos

For what it's worth, I believe losethos is now posting as SparrowOS, and that account is also dead. It's a tragic case, really, because LoseThos/SparrowOS is a fascinating piece of software, but its author is definitely on the fringes on non-software matters.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SparrowOS

He changed nicks, still hellbanned:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SparrowOS

I hope you don't find someone who has schizophrenia and hellbanned funny. Because that would be pathetic, and you would be heartless.

I no doubt misinterpreted your comment.

Not at all - I'm very sorry I gave that impression!

Rather, I find it to be a interesting window into the mind of a highly intelligent programmer afflicted with a tragic mental disorder. I enjoy reading his comments because I feel it allows me to understand, if only in a tiny way, what he's going through (although maybe this is simply hubris on my part).

If it's for a legitimate reason (credit card fraud, trolling), then why not? They more than deserve it.

Maybe there's some "compassion" bit that's stuck on in my brain, but I still feel sorry for trolls when they get hellbanned. Aside from that, a decent number of [dead] comments I see are not worth being [dead]. I used to make a point of trying to let the owner of the account know that either they made a stupid comment in the past and they should ask about getting let back in, or someone accidentally pulled the hellban drigger on their account, but it was happening often enough (and I have no connection with YC so there's no direct incentive) that I got tired of it.

How does shadowbanning even work on HN? Do you still get random increments to karma on different comments?

If not, I find it hard to believe that after long enough a period of time of noticing absolutely no activity on your posts, people won't catch on.

Also, yeah if someone is a troll I feel like it's 100% fair game to troll them back. And this is the best counter-troll of them all. I had exactly the opposite reaction of yours when I found out about the shadowban - finally! Some way for us to fight back and give them a taste of their own medicine. Assholes that they are.

There are only two problems with this - one, when people are shadowbanned wrongly/arbitrarily with no right to a fair and speedy trial in a court of their peers, and two, hypocritically I have a tendency to troll sometimes and this may or may not suck >_>

I don't even know how trolling is defined here; and without a clear definition that is actually used when hellbanning, I call BS on that. Trolling doesn't mean whatever you consider bad for whatever arbitrary reason; if it means that it means nothing, and is just an excuse and circular reasoning (ultimately defining trolls as those who got banned for whatever reason).

I can only speak for myself, but I got slowbanned for just being argumentative several times, and the fact that I got NO signal other than "somebody didn't like something in the hundreds of posts you wrote" means I can't really get invested in HN further than the comment I am reading or writing at any given moment. There is zero rhyme or reason and no class to such a process, and for all I know I just get punished for pointing out a truth someone likes to delude themselves about; so I can't even regret anything without knowing what the supposed error was. I just argue less because at the end of the day, what do I care if someone is wrong, and why spend, say, moral outrage or humour on a site that doesn't get or appreciate it, instead of letting it build up and blogging about it? That way everybody is happy :P

That said, for something like credit card fraud it actually seems smart, just like it might be for cheaters in games, or wherever you have an actual clear definition of "crime". This is not the case here, and it shows sometimes.

karma on hn is kind of odd, though; people simply don't seem to interact with the upvote button much. i wondered at one point if i had triggered some sort of ban because i had several submissions in a row sitting at 1 point, but then i got a comment upvote so i figured not. there simply isn't enough of a feedback loop for you to know for sure.

Timing is important as well. If you comment early on an article that gets lots of upvotes later on, you're more likely to get upvotes for your comments. As for submissions, it takes a lot of both luck and timing to get enough people to vote them up for them to reach the front page.

Yeah I agree with that but you pretty much ignored the question. A bad comment isn't the same as being a troll account, and you didn't mention anything about fraudsters.

Also most [dead] comments I see aren't from hellbanning.

I feel bad for trolls and even worse for people who made one remark that pissed off the wrong person and are a completely productive and well meaning poster (I regularly see this type on HN and notify them whenever possible) - but I have absolutely no sympathy for spammers and credit card fraudsters who get hellbanned. It's perfect for them.

I wasn't particularly damaged when I got hellbanned here. I was more curious than upset, and it was fun to see the different way the system behaved when it was 'pretending.'

Generally astute people notice when, if they are talking to someone, and that someone is answering in monosyllables and not paying attention that the conversation is unwelcome. It often isn't all conversations, sometimes its just this conversation. People are busy, people are distracted.

I am often surprised when hell banned people say really outrageous things, and nobody responds, how do they rationalize that? Do they consider it incomprehension? Silent agreement?

At first I thought the same thing as you. However, for instances such as this where the service is especially appealing to criminals I think this solution is reasonable.

Finding effective ways of detecting someone who deserves a hellbanning vs a college campus which has all users behind NAT who will all be upset when the cards they ordered don't arrive as expected (let's assume users don't check their statements daily so won't notice a lack of charge) is a difficult task. It's quite the tightrope you end up having to walk.

extremely psychologically damaging to thieves? I'd vote for it anyday!

It's comforting to want retribution, like a cozy blanket of anger, but (and I reserve the right to change my mind on this at some point in the future) I'd much rather try to find ways of pushing the right buttons to get thieves to become positive contributors to society.

That said, I'm in no way suggesting that payment services need to take up this responsibility at the expense of protecting legitimate users.

The only way to do that is to take away the carrot. They know perfectly well what they are risking and what they gain from it. Take away the gain and suddenly crime is much less attractive.

Very few "normal" human beings are highly rational and empathetic; it stands to reason that thieves, trolls, and fraudsters are no different, thus it's not safe to assume that they know everything they're risking or all of the consequences.

If we were talking about something other than credit card fraud I might agree with you but the whole reason why they try to buy something online first is to test it. If they realize that they can't test stolen cards anymore I doubt they will just wing it and hope to god that the card is good in the checkout lane.

Hellbans are reserved for the worst of the worst. Trolls and malcontents that a simple ban would serve as an encouragement not a discouragement.

That's true in theory. In practice, that's not what happens.

That's a question of poor moderation and admin control instead of a problem with the concept in itself I think.

If it were in physical conversation if someone consistently "spammed" a conversation, by say saying something outloud and obnoxious to get attention, I would ask them to be quiet or leave. If they became persistent the only last resort option I would find would be to ignore them altogether. It might feel morally wrong to simply ignore and pretend another person doesn't exist, but it might be the only thing that does the trick, it might cause them to rethink their words and actions.

That being said I feel like this is way it should be handled online, something like hellbanning being the last option. Unfortunately the difference between real conversation and online is that online a person can simply reenter a board with a completely different name or "face," it could be literally impossible to tell whether a new board spammer is a first-time offender or someone who's been peacefully told to quit in the past. I'm not sure that off-line morals and psychology applies here in the same way

I've seen more than one case in which someone found out they were accidentally banned months earlier, and took it very personally. I can empathize.

The other important function of hellbanning, and why I'm considering using it, is that by obscuring the moment you decided to execute the ban, you make it more difficult to reverse engineer what the criteria were. That makes it harder for an attacker to make progress in circumventing your protection.

It makes it harder to learn, and improve your behaviour. Just what we want in a community?