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Two HN Announcements

(blog.ycombinator.com)
698 points tilt | 4 comments | 29 Sep 15 18:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.617s | source
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hackuser ◴[29 Sep 15 20:46 UTC] No.10299505[source]▶
'Vouching' will not improve the quality of HN discussions. It seems like the result of an excessive focus on fairness, something I see in many online communities. It affects only a few comments which are unlikely to be particularly valuable anyway.

The quality of discussions is what brings me to HN, and IMHO the quality is poor; it's just better than the alternatives. The vast majority of comments aren't worth my time (or anyone else's, but they can speak for themselves). In other words, there is much room for improvement and I hope that is Dan's focus. I happily would accept unfairness, and suffer its slings and arrows myself, for a higher signal-to-noise ratio. I'd happily lose a few good comments in return for of better quality overall (i.e., false-positives are not really a big deal - so what if my good comment occasionally gets voted down or otherwise buried).

By prioritizing quality over fairness HN can best distinguish itself from a million noise-filled alternatives where 'rights' are the priority. Everyone has a right to their opinions, but not to my time.

EDIT: Several edits to explain myself better.

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lotharbot ◴[29 Sep 15 20:57 UTC] No.10299577[source]▶
> "It affects only a few comments which are unlikely to be particularly valuable anyway."

More importantly, it affects the occasional person who makes mostly good comments but got hellbanned 3 years ago for something that probably could have been handled with a simple downvote and a "please don't do this, here's what the guidelines say" instead.

I regularly see high-quality comments, sometimes the highest quality in an entire discussion, that are marked dead because the account is banned.

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hueving ◴[29 Sep 15 22:34 UTC] No.10300280[source]▶
hellbanning is easily the worst thing about HN. It's the embodiment of a childish idea that nobody can change, ever. It's not even effective against trolls because a troll will just change accounts immediately. It just silences a section of the population that happened to touch a nerve back in the day. A disgusting black mark on an otherwise reasonable site.
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1. lotharbot ◴[30 Sep 15 05:14 UTC] No.10301929[source]▶
I think hellbanning has its place. There are people who join websites with no intent of contributing -- who want to make trouble, to troll, to harass, to create link-juice for other sites, or otherwise benefit themselves at the expense of others. An ordinary ban simply invites them to return under a new name and keep it up. A hellban both stops their negative influence from propagating, and stops them from realizing that it's time to make a new account.

The problem, of course, is that sometimes people actually do intend to contribute but are caught in a hellban because they made a single mistake, or possibly even because they said something that bothered a moderator but was completely reasonable for them to have said. Allowing users to "vouch" is a nice counter to this -- if we see a genuine contributor who has been mistakenly flagged as a troll, we the community can fix it.

This is a fantastic change.

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2. hueving ◴[30 Sep 15 07:30 UTC] No.10302332[source]▶
Did you miss the part where a troll/spammer can just create a new account? It's trivial to see if you're hellbanned (incognito window).
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3. DanBC ◴[30 Sep 15 07:36 UTC] No.10302354[source]▶
But spammers don't tend to just make new accounts.

And it's fine that trolls create new accounts - their new accounts get banned quickly if they troll in their new account.

And we don't know if there are methods that detect account hopping. I suspect that there are.

4. lotharbot ◴[30 Sep 15 23:13 UTC] No.10308103[source]▶
I'm well aware of that step. But not every troll or spammer is. How many trolls or spammers actually research the target forum well enough to know that they use such a moderation style?

It seems to be a very small number, given how many trolls and spammers get hellbanned and keep on posting, compared to how few seem to create new accounts immediately.