Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Can you please elaborate on bad actors absuing the appeals process? Is your point about how everyone will automatically appeal, making it difficult for genuine queries to receive the human attention they need? Or is there another vector of abuse you were thinking of?



That's basically it.

If every action taken against an account by automation is appealed, then the automation becomes worthless.

In gaming forums that are run by the developer, such as the World of Warcraft or League of Legends forums, I have very frequently seen people whining and complaining that their accounts were banned for no reason until a GM or moderator finally pipes in and posts chat logs of the user spamming racial slurs or some other blatant violation of ToS.


We see that on HN too, where people who have been banned/hellbanned with ample warning are often complaining that it's because "hackernews groupthink" but when you look back at their comment history they call someone some redpilly insult in every comment they've ever made on the website.


It’s even better when they claim shady moderator censorship for user flags.


It’s even worse than that because the bad actors are doing this at scale and will have automation to auto-appeal while normal people will sometimes shrug and decide it’s not worth it. So your appeals queue likely contains a higher flow of bad actors than the distribution of FPs.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: