Right, the system is far too trigger happy. Instead of showing a newcomer what kind of comments are valued here and possibly gaining a valuable new contributor, the system severely punishes beginner mistakes. We can't reasonably expect that a new user knows what kind of comments are valued because on the rest of the internet such comments are perfectly acceptable. Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before you can use the site you have to do a quiz on what kind of comments are good comments.

"Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before you can use the site you have to do a quiz on what kind of comments are good comments."

Really? Sorry, but that sounds like a terrible idea. HN is already insular enough, we don't need to start demanding newcomers pass a test before we let them comment.

Let's see. There are two groups of people: people who would have passed the test and people who would not have. The people who would not have would most likely be hellbanned after their first 3 comments (and of course people are allowed to take the test as many times as they want). So you lose nothing. By using a test fewer legitimate people get hellbanned. In other words, this is only going to improve the situation. I'm not talking about a difficult test here: just a couple of questions like:

Comment: LOL

Is this an acceptable comment?

Right now people are used to that being an acceptable comment on the rest of the internet. These people currently get hellbanned on HN because other people downvote these comments. It's not a test for testing whether the people are acceptable on HN, it's method of teaching customs and a test for whether people have read the guidelines.

I'm not opposed to it because I think it wouldn't keep bad posters off, I'm opposed to it because it would keep most posters off. It's arrogant and self-righteous. "Sorry, you have to prove you're good enough to post on our holy news aggregator."

It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth and it's the last thing this community needs.

So you're saying that the current method of silencing those people without even notifying them is preferred? They keep posting and most times their posts add value. Yet these posts are invisible to users without the showdead option on.

The karma metric is pretty transparent. You learn very quickly which comments are and are not appreciated. Dropping a friendly comment to someone you see who hasn't caught on yet works, as well.

What do you think the likes of a Matt Cutts would do if they were trying to sign up for HN and the site forced them to say whether "LOL" was an appropriate comment before allowing them to post? It's insulting and arrogant and will drive away the kind of people we want posting here. All that for a "problem" that is invisible the vast majority of the time.

Stopping famous people from signing up is a good point.

On the other hand the system is clearly broken now.

> The karma metric is pretty transparent. You learn very quickly which comments are and are not appreciated. Dropping a friendly comment to someone you see who hasn't caught on yet works, as well.

This is not the case as it is currently implemented. If one of your first comments gets downvoted you get hellbanned. There is no chance to learn from your mistakes. Dropping a friendly comment doesn't work either because you cannot respond to hellbanned people. Do you have showdead on? Try it and you'll probably see that about half of the hellbanned people still posting invisible comments are legitimate. For example you will find 3 of those people commenting on this post, two of them having no idea that nobody is reading their comments.

For example look at http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bshock

This guy has been banned for 2 downvoted comments and has been posting legitimate but invisible comments for over a year. You can clearly see the learning effects: his first couple of comments are not HN quality. Unfortunately by the time he got accustomed to HN he had been silenced.

I think we can fix hellbanning without too much tinkering. Perhaps a simple notice if someone's first posts are downvoted advising them to check the submissions and comments guidelines, perhaps with some common first time mistakes and their more preferable counterparts added. That should help the noobs while still allowing trolls to be banned.

Just for counterpoint: it would be easy for new users to figure out what a good post is by reading and paying attention to the scores they get. One gets a sense for what makes one a -4, another a mere zero, or some other a +47.