This is notably the first time I've found myself disagreeing with you, in many kilocomments over the past several years.

I once thought it was completely terrible, but changed my mind after the losethos guy showed up — secret hellbanning is a great tactic against active trolls, whether they're intentional or clueless.

Unfortunately it and individual deletions are the sole metamoderation mechanism on Hacker News — they work abysmally for managing good-faith users having a bad day or combatting spam, and there's an order of magnitude more of that than there are trolls.

The worst part is that HN's hellbanning isn't secret — you can just turn [showdead] on, defeating the point (see the "king of the shitpile" problem: http://metatalk.metafilter.com/1786/LPP-wall-of-shame). You'll see plenty of spam on the /new page, but for almost every [dead] comment you see you'll be baffled as to what happened. Sometimes it's just a duplicate post, and occasionally for hellbanned users you can page back through their history of good but [dead] comments and find a brief fit that could have been disciplined easily with a week's time out or even a simple admonishment to stop.

What really concerns me is all the individually-deleted comments and hellbanned users I've seen where there's no context at all as to why they're [dead] — the only thing I can think of is that they were eaten by the news.arc grue.

I understand what you're saying, that pg has every right to publish or [dead] or /dev/null our posts as he sees fit — but that's no reason for him to be cruel and capricious.

That's one thing SomethingAwful---which I believe coined the term "hellbanning" and popularized it---did better than most subsequent implementations imo. It's one of several kinds of bans there, and typically used when the person in question has in fact already been normal-banned before (sometimes several times), and come back with new accounts. Reduces the false-positive rate that way. (It was also more effective for that purpose back in the days when it was used very rarely, and not widely known about.)

You should disagree with me more often. It's more fun, and even I only agree with about 97% of what I write.

HN is poorly metamoderated. Yep. But I don't buy the argument that HN is run by cruel or capricious people. I have criticisms of HN management, but those aren't among them.

So, given that, if you've got a small group of people you trust not to be random jerks about it, who are putting in the time to keep the site running and keep the community at least somewhat functional, I think it's better for everyone that stuff like banning isn't an open transparent process for all of us to get wrapped up in.

Of course pg isn't intentionally cruel or capricious — but he does not assume good faith in others

I think he sees the naughtiness that he prizes in founders in users here, and that leads him down the path to writing off everyone slightly combative as trolls

i certainly agree - people can have off days, for which the punishment of permanent non-inclusion in the community (so long as they don't find out) is really harsh and unfair, worsened by the fact that there seems to be no method of recourse for anyone it's inflicted upon..

alas i find myself agreeing with tptacek in that, i have no idea how a democracy of this would work, or even that we have any right to demand such a thing..

opens safari and checks comment is visible..

there actually is a method of recourse: email pg and have a conversation about it. i am aware of quite a number of people who have at one time been hellbanned and have had that ban reversed.

and as long as i'm commenting, i support hellbanning as well. i haven't seen anybody mention the fact that pg does this as a part-time thing. he does not have time to hold everybody's hand, explain to them what they did wrong, and deal with the inevitable heaps of abuse. it is instead incumbent on every participant to figure out the mores and rules of this mini-society, and adhere to them.