Two HN Announcements

There used to be the occasional outburst of suspicion of mean moderators with double agendas hellbanning great commenters. Dang's been very active presence here recently to explain decisions that might've seemed fishy, and that has already done a lot to remove that kind of thinking.

Nevertheless, the conspiracy theories and rebellious "<name in other thread>, looks like you've been hellbanned by the evil mods!" comments are still around, and I suspect that the 'vouch' feature will help kill the last of it. I really hope that it'll work as intended!

(assuming it's all unfounded of course, which I believe it is)

Although "<name in other thread>, looks like you've been hellbanned by the evil mods!" comments are bad, I'm not sure I've seen them. I have seen comments like "<name in other thread, you appear to have been hellbanned", but I think they were sometimes warranted. The moderators do sometimes make mistakes, and IIUC the normal way to resolve them is: user realizes they are hellbanned, mails the mods asking about it, and the mods, if they feel the user should not be hellbanned, unbans them. Alerting commenters that one thinks may have been banned by mistake of their ban can either speeds this process along or wastes comment space and moderator attention, depending on whether one is correct.

I agree that hopefully vouching will kill the "<name>, you appear to have been hellbanned" comments, though.

I don't think it's a "conspiracy," but HN has many means of opaque moderation (shadowbans, slowbans, arbitrary score penalties to control the front page), and they continue to be applied with no accountability. We play here at the mercy of capricious Gods.