A lot of HN users find the whole concept of hell banning objectionable. Because for a large number of those affected, they're not spammers or trolls, they've just made one comment that has irked an admin. It is our duty as decent human beings to inform them.
Precisely my biggest problem with HN. There needs to be a way to repeal HellBanning, some sort of an appeal mechanism or a time-based auto-repeal that kicks in after say 4 weeks of good behavior such as 25 upvoted (albeit dead) comments from the HBanned user.
Or the admins could just reserve hellbanning for only the most persistent serious trolls. It is a useful tool but should only be used in extreme circumstances, not just for one bad comment. If it was used only once a month or every few months for persistent trolls it wouldn't be a problem.
Bad comments get voted down anyway, so there's already a mechanism for that, IMHO hellbanning should really only be used on people trying to post spam repeatedly or repetitively troll comment threads.
Yes, when I saw that I could still upvote dead comments, I just assumed this data would be used that way -- otherwise what's the point in being able to do it?
