Imagine participating in a community, enjoying your interactions with some bright people, contributing knowledge when you can, when suddenly you find that you've become invisible. After some period of time wondering, you eventually find out that you are invisible.

It's a horrible thing to do to someone. I like many of the HN commenters, and I often learn something from reading what they've written, but I have nothing but disdain for the site itself, its mods, and its creator. They all contribute to doing this to people, though they'll brush it off as necessary automation, necessary for quality control, or some other sociopathic nonsense.

I wish HN would be more strict, it would drive the quality up even further. I want users to think long and hard about what they are writing and submitting.

HN is a right, not a privilege.

The internet is littered with poorly maintained communities, but HN isn't one of them, by design. If you don't get why these rules exist and you can't understand their purpose, you shouldn't be here.

Quality control and ruthless modding are certainly required - Kuro5hin is a great example of such a community which turned quickly into a hellhole when spammers and insincere trolls took over.

However I've seen plenty of hellbanned people on HN who had a completely innocuous comment history - no insults or bad behaviour - just one day their comments started being hidden. Such an extreme punishment should be reserved for spammers and people who use gross insults in arguments IMO, not imposed automatically as it appears to be.

There are many other more effective ways to police a community, including just commenting when you think something is out of line, which I think serve HN better and are also part of its quality control.

[EDIT there are even some hellbanned people in this discussion]

One such example is https://lobste.rs/ -- An invite-only version of HN. It currently suffers from not having enough discourse. One reason may be the small community size.

Actually that is my point, I was being facetious.

People who are used to seeing upvotes on their comments and submissions will notice when they have a long period of no interaction with the community and probably figure out they've been hellbanned. I'd guess most hellbanned users (who deserve it) find it comforting that their comments stopped getting downvotes and angry responses, so it might even be more humane moderation then letting the community rage at them.

As I said, I enjoy many commenters, have learned a great deal from them, and have enjoyed my conversations with them.

This is at odds with my very negative view of the site itself, its founder, and how it's moderated. Also, I have to go out of my way to ignore the enormous amounts of link-bait and startup bubble fluff. In fact, I would say that the articles themselves offer almost no value, but some of the discussions are highly educational.

All that banning did was waste a good amount of my time until I figured out what had happened, create a lot of ill-will, and then I made a new account.

In some situations under high load, the same response from Varnish (which may only available to unauthenticated users) may be an order of magnitude faster than the application server, even if they're co-located on the same physical machine.

The consensus in the commenting community was that you shouldn't downvote people without explaining why. The rule of the site is that you shouldn't complain about posts. The two are at odds, and personally I favor what the community wants, not what the site overlords dictate.

However, the hacker in me is almost curious enough to see how far I could "poke the lion with a stick". If I had more time, creating a few dozen accounts ... etc

Then I think about how I would engineer such a system and try and keep it as automated as possible. I'm sure its well written enough to threshold on some dynamic curve based on incoming traffic.

And, whilst variety is the spice of life and all that, if you are a prolific (and popular) poster, should people care if you self promote. If each of your posts is a winner, generates great readership figures and 'likes' and spikes conversation, why not allow this? So, I'd want to deviate down a score based on popularity. Then there is frequency of posting, and comment karma ...

At the end of the day whenever there is a threshold, there will be edge cases where people are the wrong side of judgment line. Banning is a digital thing, and reputation is analog. I'm glad that hn seems to have a response appeal system.

I've tweeted a few people before to let them know of their fate when their comment history didn't seem worthy of a ban and I think in all cases I've had to point out that an email needs to be sent to have the ban looked at.

Agreed, and as others mention, a little more transparency would be nice. When I signed up, I think I posted less than 10 comments, all perfectly civil and in-line, before someone informed me I appeared to be hellbanned (and was kind enough to comment on it and say they looked at my comment history and didn't see any reason). I don't know what heuristic I triggered or if it was simply a mistake, but my initial reaction was that banning was so arbitrary and capricious around here that I almost just shrugged and said, "ok, whatever, I'm not particularly invested in this site," and left. Instead I emailed [email protected] to ask why I was hellbanned, and I never got a response, but soon afterwards, the ban was lifted. I still have no idea what happened, and although I seem to have managed to find the right tone for comment threads, the machinations of the site and its rules remain shadowy and cryptic, so I have no idea if I'm eventually going to be banned again.

Edit: haha, I just went back and looked, and it was you who was so kind. Thanks, parent! :)

Indeed. I cannot for the life of me understand the logic behind this behavior. If you've been banned or had a comment killed, it would be a basic courtesy to provide some sort of notification/reason in your profile.

Knowing that I'd have gotten a warning/notification means if the site is slow, I'd brush it off as high latency. Now every time the site is a little slow, I panic and think I've been slow banned.