Two HN Announcements

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.

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.

One difference between regular banning and live banning is that the banned person is kicked out of the community with a regular ban, but not with a live ban. A live ban mitigates the effects of problematic behaviors on the community while still allowing the person behaving problematically to retain their identity and participate in ways that aren't problematic: i.e. people who are live banned can remain part of the community.

Because the live banned person remains within the community, there is an opportunity for the community to recognize unwarranted live bans based on actual exhibited behavior within the context where it is relevant. Anecdotally, I've seen unwarranted live bans lifted in real time.

I've also seen members of the Hacker News community who have benefited from keeping their identity within the community over an extended period of time while continuing to exhibit problematic behaviors. People may look at that situation and see something different, I see live banning as a highly compassionate way to solve the corner cases that need high levels of compassion.

From a practical standpoint doing regular banning "right" with formal notification, explanation, and appeals processes requires a non-trivial moderator time and energy. If most bans are justified, that means all that energy is wasted on accounts that the owner doesn't value and accounts that the owner values solely as a conduit for argument and/or insult.

Even in cases where the person values their account as an identity within the community, formal processes are an escalation. The most likely proximate cause for needing to limit that type of account is the manner in which disagreement is expressed. Creating a context that threatens identity is unlikely to suddenly produce better behavior in regard to disagreement over a sanction already enforced.

Regular banning is confrontational. One of the ways Hacker News differentiates itself from other sites where people type into boxes is by discouraging that very behavior. Lunch at Cafe Hellban comes at some cost to the community, but I believe it's lower than the alternatives.

> One difference between regular banning and live banning is that the banned person is kicked out of the community with a regular ban, but not with a live ban.*

Hellbanned users are not part of the community. The entire point is to remove them from the community without them realizing it.

(BTW, what's a "live ban"? That doesn't even make sense. Did we really need a euphemism for shadowban/hellban?)

You need to understand that hellbanning was invented as a mean of dealing with commercial spammers and malicious trolls--people who have no interest in good-faith discussion, only in provoking a reaction; if they receive a normal ban, they'll just start a new account and continue, because they have none of the investment in the community that would make them care about their old account. Hellbanning prevents them from doing that, and in the old days it was often discussed with no small amount of sniggering over the idea of some asshole troll trying and trying to piss people off and wondering why it wasn't working anymore.

A hellban works for those people; it may be the only thing that does. It is an entirely inappropriate tool to use against a user who wants to participate earnestly but is sometimes excessively rude/short-tempered, and my impression is that HN uses it that way often. (Based on the number of times I've seen commenters say "XXXX, you may not realize that you're shadowbanned, which is a shame because you've got a good point." A person who sometimes has good points is someone who should receive informed bans/suspensions, not hellbans.)