Two HN Announcements

'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.

> "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.

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.

What are the better alternatives to hellbanning?

Regular banning, of course. You tell the user that they've been banned and why. Optionally, offer tempbans (with a stated duration), and/or have an appeal mechanism; but even with neither of those, it's less sadistic than a hellban.