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Comment by bananarama44 | Hacker News Reader

apologies if this is a dumb question, but what does 'hellbanned' mean? i understand folks' concern about dubious intentions, but if it's any consolation, this is merely a class project from Clay Shirky's Designing Conversational Spaces class at NYU.

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Hellbanned means the poster sees his own comments as normal, but no one else can see them. Someone who is hellbanned typically does not know they are banned until someone tells them (or they eventually get suspicious of no one commenting on their comments or up/downvoting).

Frankly I find the idea of hellbanning childish, but it has a long history on the internet.

You mean for people like Losethos?

I'm not familiar with Losethos...mind explaining? A particularly egregious user?

Take a look at his comment history (turn showdead on first)[1]. He's a somewhat eccentric character.

   [1]:http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos

He wrote a 64 bit OS from scratch where the shell uses C as it's scripting language, and I believe everything runs in Ring 0. Also no protected or virtual memory. So if you go over on an array index, well you could screw up some of the kernel memory space. Brilliant, but crazy. See above, and read some of his comments. He seems to be some sort of fundamentalist christian, and IIRC his comments were about saving everyone though Jesus or some such thing.

> Brilliant, but crazy. See above, and read some of his comments. He seems to be some sort of fundamentalist christian, and IIRC his comments were about saving everyone though Jesus or some such thing.

This isn't the whole picture. He's, unfortunately, schizophrenic. Read [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642308] and [http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html].

I thought the same thing. I find it shameful.

Poor guy, I used to be like that. That's a type of brain washing only Reddit/Athiesm/ and 4chan/b/ can fix.

> Frankly I find the idea of hellbanning childish

That's not too surprising, since the name (though possibly not the practice?) originated at SomethingAwful, and SA bans are pretty deliberately intended to be a mixture of serious and prankish, with a bit of arbitrariness thrown in.

It's not childish, it's used to defeat trolls. If you ban a troll, they'll realize it next time they try to log in and it says "YOU HAVE BEEN BANNED."

But if you hellban them, then they'll log in just fine, they'll post just fine... but no one will respond to their posts. Eventually they'll get bored because they can't get a rise out of anyone and they'll leave.

Similarly, some sites use "discouragement," where the site will run fine, but on their machine it'll behave slowly and sometimes fail completely (bad page loads, excessively long waits then nothing happens, etc).

Sometimes I wonder if PayPal is using this approach.

Fair point. I guess it's easier to hellban than block them off the site or keep removing their new usernames.

Easy to block a single account. Very time consuming to continually block the same person over and over and over again - especially on a large and very active forum where the admins don't read every post on every thread.

That's called "shadowban" in my neck of the woods.

I've also seen it called a "ninjaban".

I think it should be called ghosting.

He dropped a hard J, so we ghosted him on the spot.

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