My old account: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=chbarts
What a waste
Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us
81–90 of 102 posts
Re: Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us
#82The hellbanning/ghostbanning/whatever is one of a very few things that disturbs me about this community. I can see how it could prevent the problem of a banned user immediately creating new usernames, but it's also easy to imagine how it could be abused.
I keep "showdead" on and I have occasionally seen a user marked as dead whose comments didn't seem to me to warrant that. I support the resurrection vote idea.
Re: Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
were you doing some weird voting? because the comments / submissions don't seem to justify banning. normally with banned accts it's obvious why. in fact, are you sure you were banned? apart from the last comment, which might have been deleted, it doesn't seem to me like you were hellbanned. your other comments are not greyed out.
Interesting, perhaps I wasn't. I know I tried to make a submission or two and it said 'Slow down!' all the time, and that the site was very slow. I assumed this meant I was banned.
[deleted]
Re: Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us
#84I don't know who the moderators are or exactly how this works, but I believe that some of them may be abusing their position at times to shut down opinions that are contrary to their own.
Re: Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us
#85This actually wasn't my first account. I lurked for a while and then finally decided to join. When I first joined, I commented for a few weeks and then stumbled into a conversation that involved Steve Jobs and poaching employees. The top comment was talking about how greedy Jobs was and I replied pointing out that he had taken $1 in salary and no stocks for several years. I wasn't totally clear in my first comment an…
Slashdot's moderation system is much better in this regard. The users starting score for new posts first goes to 0 and then -1 so that the comment will be collapsed by default reducing visibility but they can still accrue upvotes and karma allowing the users starting score to recover instead of turning the site into a zombie town where the zombies don't know they're dead.
Re: Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was quite some time ago that I was hell-banned, but I think it was because my account got progressively slower, and I wasn't getting any replies or upvotes. I think I might of googled 'why is hacker news slow', and that's how I found out.
are you sure? see my other reply to you here. you can easily check if you are hellbanned by logging out and seeing if you can see your posts. the site is sometimes slow and often people don't reply...
Ah dang. I don't think I was actually. I don't think I'll go back to my old account though - I have karma on this one that I'd prefer to hang on to (in case I make a stupid comment one day and get down-voted heavily).
Re: Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also got some sort of partial "status reduction", less than a full ban: my ability to flag posts disappeared. I sent an e-mail and got it reinstated. But I still have no idea what I might have done wrong, and neither does the HN moderator who reinstated me. I understand that the HN mods don't want to have to explain every action, and when someone really deserves a partial or full ban they don't want to announce it…
I also lost Flag privileges, I thought I was being helpful to the community, but I guess not!
I just noticed I don't have flag privileges either, at least for comments (I still have them for submissions.) I'm sure I used to. I can't remember ever having flagged anything. Is this based on karma levels or something else? Now I'm worried I've done something wrong.
Re: Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially when I follow that by saying I read the comments! (But for the most part, no one reads the comments of the dead.)
If online polls were reliable, that would be an interesting one to set up. I too always read the dead comments, and given the curious nature of hackers, I suspect many others are.
Make a poll: "Is the post linked to in this post visible?" then link to a post you've made from a dead account. The dead post is itself a poll that says "This is the real poll, if you see this post, vote yes on this poll."
Re: Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us
#89I think the best solution would be a per account killfile.
Letting somebody post while dead without them realizing it is a kind of emotional abuse called gaslighting, which is based on confusing a person about the nature of the reality they experience. It doesn't have to be intentional for it to be abuse. By hell-banning accounts without notice you are basically denying the person's perceptions; they wonder what's wrong with them, why doesn't anybody care about what they say, when everybody else can see they are dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
Even without banning accounts, I find that the greying out of downvoted posts is a kind of public humiliation for bad behavior. At the very least, the option not to have the text greyed out would be nice.
And then finally, this entire thread is violating the HN guidelines:
> Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com.
So it's not like they're going to be particularly open to feedback, and I would be surprised if anything came of this. There's a feature requests link at the bottom that is the right place to post this, but it's basically ignored.
Re: Ask PG: Please consider a resurrection vote for the undead amongst us
#90From some point comments of my main account stopped getting upvotes. After seing this post I thought that maybe I am dead and given the assumption that you can't see if yourself are dead I created a separate account and inspected my comments. Sadly, it turns out my comments are just bad :(. I don't know which answer I hoped for.