Hacker Jews

Best Thread of HJ:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477488

I was hellbanned for a while without realizing on a different account. I was incredibly upset when I realized: a bunch of posts asking or answering meaningful on-topic questions had been blackholed, wasting a lot of my time, and (in my view) lowering the value of this site to everyone.

I never did figure out why I'd been hellbanned; my (polite and apologetic) emails were never answered. I'd never been impolite, trolled, or called people names, and although I was a fairly new user, I'd built up karma quickly in that short period. (Around 100 karma in 30 days; not too bad I thought.) I'd hardly ever been downvoted, and even now, looking back, I have absolutely no idea what I might have done to warrant a hellban.

Hellbanning "normal" users is just cruel. If your spambot/troll problems are so bad that you need to resort to hellbanning, it should be used rarely and sparingly. But on HN, apparently, it's not. If you browse with show dead on, I'd say 9 times out of 10 the hellbaned people you'll see should never have been hellbanned. And, take it from me, it really really sucks to realize that someone you don't even know has taken a couple seconds out of their busy day to screw with you and waste hours and hours of your time, without any possibility of recompense, or even a dialogue.

I browse with showdead on, and it seems to me that most people I see that are hellbanned got there seemingly innocently. Mostly it's that they said something mildly controversial in one of their first posts. Once they go negative karma on the account they can never get back. I'd say people like that outnumber spammers and wackos 4 or 5 to 1. Plenty of them have been posting straight into the wastebin for months or years. Seems like a broken mechanic.

>>32
Fuck off, dipshit.

>>35
Dear enlarged anus,

I know this is kopipe and trolling, but I'll reply anyway.

We're stuck with the names we're born with, but we choose our screen names and email addresses. *snip* accordingly.
I heard this crazy rumour that you could create different email addresses for different purposes; the email you use to communicate with the gay teledildonics mailing list needs not be the same as you work email, and you can withhold your name in the former case (and with the help of privacy-enhancing software, make it nearly impossible for anyone to find it out).

Even if posting on bulletin boards or newsgroups, what's the harm in letting people know your name?
Because they don't need to.  Pseudonyms or tripcodes are all that is required to make conversations easier to track or to authenticate one's postings (which may be done with GPG).  Basic rule of security, if someone doesn't need to know something, they shouldn't.

I understand using a human-readable anti-spam device when typing in your email address, but isn't your humanity more important than your anonymity?
Fuck that shit and fuck you.

Signed,
Integer