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It's either that or implementing captchas. And I think pg is not very motivated to do the latter. edit: top of my head reply/speculation so I don't claim any factual accuracy.
Blocking Tor won't stop any spam. Real spammers have tens of thousands of unique addresses to use; why would they use the 300 or so exit nodes that Tor has available?
I just took a look at the new page, and it doesn't look any different to normal. The users of those posts aren't necessarily hellbanned - the posts are though. If enough people flag a new story I think it'll automatically be marked dead. Usually it's just for spammy crap, or stories that aren't very interesting.
Emailing info@ycombinator.com is the way to get these questions answered.
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There's also a feature that slows down the site for a user under certain conditions. It's surreptitious crap like this that makes HN such a pain to use for a lot of us.
For how long have you run a popular discussion web site, and what measures do you take to reduce the increased snarkiness in extended exchanges? I'd love to hear how you solve the problem.
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There's also a feature that slows down the site for a user under certain conditions. It's surreptitious crap like this that makes HN such a pain to use for a lot of us.
For how long have you run a popular discussion web site, and what measures do you take to reduce the increased snarkiness in extended exchanges? I'd love to hear how you solve the problem.
Whenever someone is penalized, point them to the specific rules they violated. And keep in mind that people make mistakes every now and then. Show largesse. This isn't a production line where flawed products are tossed out at the blink of an eye.
Last, don't view everything as a "problem" to be "solved". We're talking about human beings, not Turing-complete automatons. That's a big part of the problem with how HN is run. You will never "solve" this the way you would a bug.
You need a human element to address something human. Treating everyone like a spam bot only works for spam bots, and has the side effect of pissing off the human false positives.
I submitted a link a few days ago about a possible IE 0-day in the wild and it immediately became "[dead]". It's the first submission I've ever made and I haven't, AFAIK, broken any HN rules since I finally created my account (after years of lurking). On a related note, you will be hellbanned if you create an HN account over Tor (even if you "don't do anything wrong"). Considering the recent NSA revelations, I think…
It's either that or implementing captchas. And I think pg is not very motivated to do the latter. edit: top of my head reply/speculation so I don't claim any factual accuracy.
Posting out of turn? That's a banning. Posting from the wrong browser window? That's a banning. Staring at my post? That's a banning. Post about banning? Oh, better believe that's a banning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also a feature that slows down the site for a user under certain conditions. It's surreptitious crap like this that makes HN such a pain to use for a lot of us.
For how long have you run a popular discussion web site, and what measures do you take to reduce the increased snarkiness in extended exchanges? I'd love to hear how you solve the problem.
Interventions helped.
This only works with moderators who aren't narcissistic, megalomaniacal and/or sociopathic (marginally or beyond). When snark got to be irritating, we would issue a written warning privately. If that went ignored, we'd revoke posting privileges for a day or two (sometimes longer if it's a bad case). Worst offenders got banned. This worked fairly well because our forum was invite only, a bit like Gmail's early days.
If we found that troublesome users were invited from the same set of accounts, we'd issue warnings to the entire tree, so to speak, or in the worst case, kill it with lightning.
Above all else, mods were forbidden from identifying themselves in any way as mods as long as they had the privilege (this will cycle on and off as needed between a select pool of users).
We also had some peculiar rules : http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/harshest-forum-rules-...
As they say, most people are basically good.
Sometimes they are surprisingly unaware of how hurtful their posts can be. There's a dehumanizing effect introduced when your communications are filtered through text and suddenly there isn't a "person" per-se at the other end. When this is pointed out to them, usually they understand and adjust themselves.
There are exceptions to this, of course, and the best way to deal with them is to not interact, entertain or in any way give them an audience. Hellbanning in this regard isn't my favorite technique, but it seems to work to some degree.
Now that would only be acceptable if its application is flawless. Sadly, from from what we've seen so far, it isn't.
Edit: Just remembered that I wrote a (longer) spiel about this a little while ago http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/re-wordpress-com-foru...
Emailing info@ycombinator.com is the way to get these questions answered.
An open discussion has the benefit of generating valuable feedback for PG.