Is there going to be a process around hellbanning?

Question

Given Jeff's recent blog post about hellbanning users, I must say I think the idea (making that user's content visible to only them) is a good one.

However, the people in whose hands that power will be placed terrify me.

Jeff is saying that he doesn't like that bans can degenerate into meta-discussions about the fairness of banning, and in that respect I agree with him. But the meta-discussions do accomplish one thing -- they get more than one person to look at the ban and weigh in on what they think.

This isn't that I don't trust moderators (or, indeed, diamond moderators), but I don't trust any one single human being with an irrevocable and complete banhammer, where there's no potential to dispute things. (And if the user doesn't know they're banned, there's no potential for dispute)

Basically, I'd sleep a lot more soundly at night knowing that if one of these "enhanced bans" are put into place, that at least two people have looked at the "problem child", and only after more than one person has signed off on such a ban, does that go into effect. I don't care exactly what that process is, but I don't want to have to worry about pissing off a moderator and getting banned as a result.

We all get pissed off here -- it's part of any community. But "the nuclear option(s)" need(s) to be decided upon by someone with a cool head, not someone who's pissed off.

Answer 1

Hellbanning, slowbanning, errorbanning, and randombanning are all things we have never experimented with and do not intend to.

It is very hard to make the argument that using extreme evil to battle evil makes the internet better.

Our current measures of banning and stopping the huge flow of extreme low quality posts seem to be doing fine. In fact, I think we are doing way better than we were 3 months ago.

We also seem to be fine dealing with people complaining about "why kan i nt aks Qestion URGNT?".

I think we can stop the flow of crap by improving our existing systems, while being transparent about what it is we are doing.

When we stop people from asking questions, we stop them from asking questions; we do not put them in a virtual reality sandbox.

Answer 2

Short Version: I have deep reservations about putting in a system that attempts to promote good behavior by behaving badly.

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Let me start by pointing out that, to some degree, we already take out the trash without you knowing about it, and without getting into endless discussions on meta every time it happens. This is possible because, as a community, we have come to a consensus over time about

1. What the vision of StackOverflow is, and
2. What behaviors are consistent with that vision.

So while not everyone agrees with, for example, moderators unilaterally closing (and in some cases) deleting questions without debate, we do it anyway, because the community (for the most part) has already decided, via a democratic process that we want to live in a nice place, not one overrun with broken windows.

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Recently, SE has begun implementing certain control mechanisms that are not only invisible to most users, but are also automatic. This includes the "low quality" IP ban that you may have seen new users complain on Meta about. When this was first implemented, there was a debate on meta, not about the relative merits of such a system, but about the error message that was being shown to these users:

Oops! Your question couldn't be submitted because:
Sorry, we can't accept this question.

The error message was eventually changed to this:

Oops! Your question couldn't be submitted because:
It does not meet our quality standards.

If this had happened on a non-programmers site, the error message might have never gotten changed. But programmers are a pedantic lot, and since the error message didn't actually say anything, the community rightly challenged it.

Hellbanning takes this innocent bit of obfuscation, and raises it to a whole new level of dishonesty.

How can you expect your community members to act with integrity, when you can't do so yourselves?

Yes, representative democracy is messy. But would you rather have this??

Answer 3

Hellbanning shows a real lack of integrity.

Everything should be open and transparent. Users should be given the chance to change their behaviour, and if they're hellbanned they won't even know they need to change. If they're bad enough to hellban, then they're bad enough to ban. We just need exact, objective reasons and then if they don't change after a few suspensions, then really ban them, don't fake them out.

All hellbanning does is keep those users from complaining elsewhere, and maybe we need to make sure they can complain elsewhere, so that banning doesn't become just a matter of course.

Every ban should be carefully thought out on a case-by-case basis, based on objective standards.

Answer 4

I definitely agree that there should be a process to follow for this special kind of ban. My guess is that hellbanning will be a last resort, after several rounds of increasingly lengthy regular timed suspensions have already been tried.

As for checks and balances, there is a list of currently suspended users that all moderators can see, and any one of us can lift a suspension that another has placed. We also all get a system message when a user is placed in timed suspension, so it would be difficult for any one of us to suspend someone without cause.

Answer 5

As others have pointed out, I didn't read Jeff's post as a feature announcement but as a general musing.

That said, I share all the reservations expressed here.

On another note, maybe I'm being thick, but don't hellbans only work on people who don't know that they exist? Because an easy way to tell would be to logout and go looking for your questions?

EDIT The other thing which bothers me about hellbanning is 'wasting' all that time implementing what amounts to an exotic Easter egg - for users you don't even want... And all that just to avoid discussions which are mostly fuelled by lack of trust.

It's difficult to balance the conflicting needs for transparency (letting people air their doubts and informing them appropriately) and tranquillity (not being drowned in vitriol and 'meta' noise), but I strongly doubt that hellbanning is the solution.

Answer 6

Hellbanning would not work well as:

• People access the sites from more then one IP address
• People can check if their post is on the site via their favourite search engine
• There is no need to be logged on to access the site.

Therefore it is very likely that sooner or later a person that had been "hellbanned" would find out.

Answer 7

First, I think hellbanning is a useful tool in "private" forums. (I'll define private as "obviously owned by a single person or small group"). In that context, I treat their forum as part of their house - they can choose the rules. So, for example, if someone is really honking Jeff off on the Coding Horror forum... I'd say it's completely within his rights to make the offender hellbanned, if Jeff chooses.

Around here, I don't think the system would work as well - mainly because hellbanning only works if people aren't aware that it's happening. With a larger group of moderators (who would all have to be aware, if not actively agreeing), the required discretion wouldn't be possible. Hellbanning with the offender's knowledge is just read-only access.

So, to answer the question, I'd say that hellbanning isn't the right tool in our toolbox.