Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

(l)uriel has passed away

9fans.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 108 posts

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#91

Post by TheAmazingIdiot »

chc wrote: post #84
CamperBob2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed... a few minutes after you turn on showdead you'll see that hellbanning is not used primarily for troll control. Trolls are people who post goatse links or overtly inflammatory opinions that they clearly don't even hold. Instead, hellbanning on HN is used on people who disagree with someone who has the power to do something about it. It's used to dismiss people who stray outside the hive and fail to toe the pa…

Amy Hoy and Thomas Ptacek strongly disagree with both the majority here and Paul Graham himself all the time, yet they aren't hellbanned. It's not just "straying outside the hive" or "failing to toe the party line" — much of the time, it's expressing offensive opinions (e.g. "women are inferior"), trying to shove your opinion down people's throats to the detriment of the site overall (e.g. losethos' weird Christian r…

Why not discuss topics of ethics like "women are inferior"?

If these conclusions are oh so horribly wrong, then bringing them out 'in the sun' should make them self evident they are not true. And beyond that, people who make claims such as that usually have false premises in which that and other statements of fact are also just as incorrect.

The statement about people who baselessly insult (Mac-fag and ilk) we can do without in a community.

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#92

Post by chc »

TheAmazingIdiot wrote: post #91
chc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amy Hoy and Thomas Ptacek strongly disagree with both the majority here and Paul Graham himself all the time, yet they aren't hellbanned. It's not just "straying outside the hive" or "failing to toe the party line" — much of the time, it's expressing offensive opinions (e.g. "women are inferior"), trying to shove your opinion down people's throats to the detriment of the site overall (e.g. losethos' weird Christian r…

Why not discuss topics of ethics like "women are inferior"? If these conclusions are oh so horribly wrong, then bringing them out 'in the sun' should make them self evident they are not true. And beyond that, people who make claims such as that usually have false premises in which that and other statements of fact are also just as incorrect. The statement about people who baselessly insult (Mac-fag and ilk) we can do…

> Why not discuss topics of ethics like "women are inferior"?

> If these conclusions are oh so horribly wrong, then bringing them out 'in the sun' should make them self evident they are not true.

You might think that, but in practice they're just shouting matches that accomplish nothing but offense. Those discussions will not convince people who are committed to their views (who are the ones most likely to start a "women are inferior"-type thread), but they will drag down the quality of conversation and lead to (for example) more overall sexist speech on Hacker News. Even if you did convince someone (which you won't 99% of the time), there's an endless supply of other jerks to keep dragging the conversation down if you let them.

There are places to talk about absolutely anything that's on your mind in whatever manner you feel like. This isn't one of them. Hacker News has standards. Not every place has to be a perfect bastion of unfettered free speech. You'll also not get to stay in my apartment very long if you call my girlfriend a prostitute, even though that is also easily disproven.

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#93

Post by tptacek »

chc wrote: post #84
CamperBob2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed... a few minutes after you turn on showdead you'll see that hellbanning is not used primarily for troll control. Trolls are people who post goatse links or overtly inflammatory opinions that they clearly don't even hold. Instead, hellbanning on HN is used on people who disagree with someone who has the power to do something about it. It's used to dismiss people who stray outside the hive and fail to toe the pa…

Amy Hoy and Thomas Ptacek strongly disagree with both the majority here and Paul Graham himself all the time, yet they aren't hellbanned. It's not just "straying outside the hive" or "failing to toe the party line" — much of the time, it's expressing offensive opinions (e.g. "women are inferior"), trying to shove your opinion down people's throats to the detriment of the site overall (e.g. losethos' weird Christian r…

The hellbanning "system" is causing more trouble that it's solving. It needs to go.

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#94

Post by chc »

tptacek wrote: post #93
chc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amy Hoy and Thomas Ptacek strongly disagree with both the majority here and Paul Graham himself all the time, yet they aren't hellbanned. It's not just "straying outside the hive" or "failing to toe the party line" — much of the time, it's expressing offensive opinions (e.g. "women are inferior"), trying to shove your opinion down people's throats to the detriment of the site overall (e.g. losethos' weird Christian r…

The hellbanning "system" is causing more trouble that it's solving. It needs to go.

I think you're also conflating the practice of hellbanning with the system that HN currently implements, where people are hellbanned when a warning or time-out would be much more appropriate. They're two different things. Hellbanning is an effective deterrent, but of course any deterrent will be problematic when applied to the wrong people.

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#95

Post by potatolicious »

chc wrote: post #90
potatolicious wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, which brings to question why hellban jerks instead of just regular-banning them. Hellbans are designed to be undetected by the banned party, to prevent them from reating a cat and mouse situation where site operators constantly fight to keep the banned off the site (new accounts, new IPs, etc). Very few of the people who are being banned from the site appear to be trolls - if they're just jerks, do they not de…

As you just said, it's to prevent the whack-a-mole game of impotently banning an endless stream of new accounts. Being a jerk is strongly correlated with not respecting bans — if they cared about your wishes in the first place, they wouldn't have acted so inconsiderate. If you ban a jerk, they make a new account and keep at it. If you hellban them, they tend to stay that way for a good long while. I do think there sh…

> "Being a jerk is strongly correlated with not respecting bans"

Big citation needed on this. If anything, look at the namesake of this post - this is a guy who was banned for inflammatory views, but there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it, and no indication that he would've become the incessant ban-dodger had he known he was banned.

I don't think the link between espousing inflammatory views and waging a troll-war on a community is really that obvious.

> "It is the most effective countermeasure available."

In the same way a nuclear missile is the most effective countermeasure available against annoying neighbors. Technically true, but complete and utter overkill. The problem here is that on HN so many people have been hellbanned, with such regularity, who show no inclination towards being a troll, that there is a site-wide consciousness for this sort of thing, making the hellban itself less effective. You need to reserve your strongest tools for the cases that truly demand it - popping off the internet forum equivalent of a nuclear missile at every turn simply makes it less effective when you do need it.

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#96

Post by chc »

potatolicious wrote: post #95
chc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you just said, it's to prevent the whack-a-mole game of impotently banning an endless stream of new accounts. Being a jerk is strongly correlated with not respecting bans — if they cared about your wishes in the first place, they wouldn't have acted so inconsiderate. If you ban a jerk, they make a new account and keep at it. If you hellban them, they tend to stay that way for a good long while. I do think there sh…

> "Being a jerk is strongly correlated with not respecting bans" Big citation needed on this. If anything, look at the namesake of this post - this is a guy who was banned for inflammatory views, but there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it, and no indication that he would've become the incessant ban-dodger had he known he was banned. I don't think the link between espousing inflammatory…

> Big citation needed on this.

Eh, honestly, just experience. I've served as moderator at a number of forums in my days and talked to moderators of other forums. If someone actually respected a permaban, it was a strong indicator that they weren't so bad after all, because the real jerks would just make a new account and continue. The defining quality of a jerk is that he doesn't care about other people's wishes, and that includes your wish that he go elsewhere.

> If anything, look at the namesake of this post - this is a guy who was banned for inflammatory views, but there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it, and no indication that he would've become the incessant ban-dodger had he known he was banned.

And sure enough, I have already said many times now that I didn't think he was a good candiate for a hellban. Just because I think hellbans are a good tool doesn't mean I think everybody should be hellbanned. However, I will address one point that I think gets more to the heart of the issue:

> there is no indication that he was riling people up for the sake of it

It doesn't really matter if somebody is trolling or just an inconsiderate jerk. From the point of view of having a healthy community, I don't care why somebody is radioactively toxic — I just care that they stop doing it.

The reason Uriel was a bad hellban is that he wasn't incorrigibly toxic. But many people are just jerks, with 60% of their posts being pure nastiness, and they do need to go, and hellbans are the best way to accomplish it.

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#97

Post by tptacek »

chc wrote: post #94
tptacek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hellbanning "system" is causing more trouble that it's solving. It needs to go.

I think you're also conflating the practice of hellbanning with the system that HN currently implements, where people are hellbanned when a warning or time-out would be much more appropriate. They're two different things. Hellbanning is an effective deterrent, but of course any deterrent will be problematic when applied to the wrong people.

I've started making an effort to reach out to people who are obviously hellbanned and who subsequently make substantive comments; I think other people should do it too. A sibling comment next to [dead] ones might suffice, if we can make sure we only get one of those comments in each thread.

I don't personalize it or "blame" Graham for it; I understand why he started the practice. But he should stop now.

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#98

Post by libria »

draven wrote: post #7
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #2

For anyone else who needs more context: http://www.advogato.org/person/uriel/ and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=uriel edit: His more recent account was http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luriel I dug up those links because I was completely unfamiliar with uriel before seeing this post, and know nothing more about this story than that. From reading his comments, he seemed like a really smart guy. It's really a…

Isn't https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luriel the same guy? He was fairly active in all recent discussions about Go. What happened to him?

From /r/programming

> "uriel has died peacefully a few days ago after having arranged everything very carefully."

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/11h7ab/9fans_ur...

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#99

Post by ekianjo »

masklinn wrote: post #34
ekianjo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow in what he liked about Japan I find it unlikely he was of "old age" but maybe I am wrong.

According to http://uriel.cat-v.org/quotes he was 30 (22 in 2004)

That's what I thought because I am around the same age and can relate with lots of what he likes.

Re: (l)uriel has passed away

#100

Post by hindsightbias »

dmorgan wrote: post #25
pygy_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enable the `showdead` option. He was hellbanned for voicing a dissenting opinion in a thread about sexism.

Yes, because "free speech" is nice and all, but there are some opinions that you should not have, even on a liberal place like Hacker News. One should not be allowed to divert from popular opinion (be it popular in society in general, in some conservative circle, or merely popular within the hip crowd), even if he is not being trollish and is providing arguments about it. In issues where most HN people agree, you sho…

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Post reply on HN