Ask HN: Banned from HN after years of productive conversation...
3 comments
<sigh>
People regularly complain about this. If you do a search you'll find all the advice you need about what to do when banned.
However ...
HN is popular, and attracts many, many trolls. A great way of dealing with trolls is the hellban, wherein posts and comments are visible to the submitter, but not to anyone else. The troll then doesn't try to circumvent the ban, because they don't know it's there, and everyone else gets a comparatively clean site.
This process is, to the best or my knowledge, at least partly automated. There are (probably several) algorithms to detect troll-like behavior, and it's likely that sometimes the bans are automatic. But because they are algorithms, and because this kind of stuff is hard, there is the occasional false positive.
Plausibly, in this case, you.
I haven't bothered to read the enormous block of text you submitted. Have a look at it - do you really want people to read it? If so, try harder to make it readable. However, the advice that's always given is simply to email pg and ask if this is a mistake. If so, it will be reversed promptly. If not, he might explain what you've done to provoke it. When I've been banned he has responded promptly every time. I have, however, explicitly followed the advice to be found on the web about how to get responses from busy people.
So my suggestion is simply that you email pg. That's what the advice has been every time I've seen this complaint.
People regularly complain about this. If you do a search you'll find all the advice you need about what to do when banned.
However ...
HN is popular, and attracts many, many trolls. A great way of dealing with trolls is the hellban, wherein posts and comments are visible to the submitter, but not to anyone else. The troll then doesn't try to circumvent the ban, because they don't know it's there, and everyone else gets a comparatively clean site.
This process is, to the best or my knowledge, at least partly automated. There are (probably several) algorithms to detect troll-like behavior, and it's likely that sometimes the bans are automatic. But because they are algorithms, and because this kind of stuff is hard, there is the occasional false positive.
Plausibly, in this case, you.
I haven't bothered to read the enormous block of text you submitted. Have a look at it - do you really want people to read it? If so, try harder to make it readable. However, the advice that's always given is simply to email pg and ask if this is a mistake. If so, it will be reversed promptly. If not, he might explain what you've done to provoke it. When I've been banned he has responded promptly every time. I have, however, explicitly followed the advice to be found on the web about how to get responses from busy people.
So my suggestion is simply that you email pg. That's what the advice has been every time I've seen this complaint.
I went through the same thing. When link shorteners were all the rage, I wasn't the earliest adopter, but I re-submitted a few posts, once a piece, using a bit.ly link, to track links across properties, all shortened, together.
I purposely did this, but didn't realize that HN would view this as some sort of link scamming behavior to manipulate the system and they banned an account I had for 6+ months. I disputed, after a fellow HN user notified me (I was slow banned). I appealed to PG, who explained the situation. The account was never recovered.
The point is, you'll get a chance to plead your case. But, it seems they don't haphazardly ban.
Good Luck.
I purposely did this, but didn't realize that HN would view this as some sort of link scamming behavior to manipulate the system and they banned an account I had for 6+ months. I disputed, after a fellow HN user notified me (I was slow banned). I appealed to PG, who explained the situation. The account was never recovered.
The point is, you'll get a chance to plead your case. But, it seems they don't haphazardly ban.
Good Luck.
The combination of this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4020836 and this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4020790 might have garnered enough "flags" to be autobanned. Try emailing [email protected] and ask if they'll reinstate you. They once banned me just by accident.
After years of productive and insightful conversation, it seems I was banned without notice from hacker news.
Presumably, this was because I used the 'f' word once. I had accumulated 2205 karma points, with an average of > 4 per post. I consider myself to be a productive member of the community. It appears someone did not.
Worse, this banning was done without any notification, and in the rather cowardly silent manner of making my posts visible only to me, rather than notifying me or providing me some sort indication. Further, no one objected to my use of the word, although some incorrectly concluded that I was taking the original post personally.
There does not appear to be any notification or process around banning. After wondering why reasonable questions and comments were not getting any replies, I checked to see if my posts were appearing and it seems they no longer are.
Oddly, the comment immediately prior to the one that seems to have provoked the "ban" was on handling trolls.
What's the recourse? How do such bans happen? How do you prevent the vast YC alumni network from having once overly sensitive person banning legitimate contributors they disagree with (since presumably they are the ones with this privilege)?
Judge for yourself:
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=aneth
And my most recent comments that are not visible:
* 1 point by aneth 31 minutes ago | link | parent | edit | delete | on: Stripe open-sources Einhorn
I just heard of Unicorn / Rainbow as a way to get more out of Heroku workers/dynos. I wonder if this is also compatible, or a better alternative? I'm new to this whole concept, so am just about to get my feet wet. Hopefully, Heroku will implement something like this internally, as it seems it would help them to eliminate the greatest flaw with their system - that each deployment require 5-10 seconds of downtime as new dynos are started. -----
* 1 point by aneth 10 hours ago | link | parent | on: Matt Mullenweg: I’m Worried That Silicon Valley Mi...
Perhaps in order to resolve this ethical quandry, he should include customizable limiting features when notifications are implemented, much like HN has. This would be unusual in a consumer web product, and might be both a differentiating feature and good for PR. "bug me no more than once every 4 hours" might be a nice setting. -----
* 1 point by aneth 2 days ago | link | parent | on: Laravel : A New PHP Framework<p>If you want to create a new framework, why create it in PHP instead of switching to a language that is not deeply flawed? Any decision to use PHP on a green project seems to me the consequence of either technical decision making incompetence, or personal or organizational inertia, only the last of which is generally excusable. Using PHP otherwise seems like requiring your organization to use IE7 because you don't have the resources or energy to learn how to upgrade your infrastructure. At best it's a reasonable preservation of resource, but generally it's laziness. Learn something new and good - Ruby, Python, Java, Scala, C#, node, heck even Perl. I know I'll take hits for this, but seriously - how is continuing to use PHP any more justified than forcing old, flawed technologies like IE 7 unnecessarily on your organization? It's the same stubborn laziness and curmudgeonry - sticking to and forcing on others your bad status quo. PHP is better at nothing than alternatives (except introducing obscure bugs) and worse at so many things . -----
* 1 point by aneth 2 days ago | link | parent | on: The "bat signal" for the Internet
While I like the general idea.... "If you have a website, we'll send you sample alert code to get working in advance. The next time there's an emergency, we'll tell you and send new code." Am I the only one who finds this either unnecessarily complicated or technically incompetent? -----
*
1 point by aneth 4 days ago | link | parent | on: FCC: The Countdown to IPv6 is On
I'm not familiar enough with the consequences of this change, however it seems likely such a major transition of a fundamental network layer could hardly occur as smoothly as expected. Perhaps someone knowledgeable can explain what the worst case scenario might be and whether this will be a thorn in our sides for the next 10 years.
REPLIES
- The first post was an unreadable block of text, because the first submission resulted in the dreaded "dead link" error - since apparently my session had expired and HN uses some continuation based stateful framework for form submission. When I copy/pasted it resulted in an ugly block of text with <p> everywhere, which I had to carefully substitute.
- A agree the two posts mentioned are a bit more emotional than my usual, however I don't think either of them amount to trolling or are particularly offensive. It seemed at least some people enjoyed them.