It's unfair to blame Paul Graham for every moderation decision made on
HN. It's been stated that YC funded founders help with moderation and
editing on HN, and it's a safe bet that YC partners also have elevated
permissions here. If you're like me, a normal HN user, then you will
never know all the details. If you find yourself having a bias based on
knowingly incomplete information, then you need to stop and rethink your
position.

The most any normal user can say for certain about jcs getting
hellbanned is, he did something annoying enough that someone did
something about it!!! --Unfortunately, if you believed the previous
sentence, you are mistaken.

The reality is, a lot of stuff on HN is automated. If you do bad stuff,
bad things happen to you (your account) automatically. For example, if
you get into a flame war and pass the "posting too fast" threshold,
you could get warnings initially, and if you still don't stop, you could
hellban yourself. In other words, you simply never know if a human being
with moderator privileges did something, or if you did it to yourself.
Also, you don't know if it's permanent or temporary.

The most I can say with real certainty is, pg is smart enough to design
a system which merely gives users enough rope to hang themselves. I
would do the same, and if you've studied the problem in depth, you would
too. Eliminating human moderation through computerized automation is the
only sane way to design a discussion forum.

Now if you were a long time, active contributor like jcs, and you
ensnared yourself in the sites protective automation, and you thought
someone was doing it to you, then ya, you might be miffed. You would
probably react harshly, and by doing so, make matters even worse for
yourself and give yourself even more "reason" to be upset.

Have you ever watched someone get absolutely livid at a chat bot?

It's hilarious. It may be a wee bit sadistic to let them keep trading
increasingly heated insults with a machine, but it's still fun to watch.
At the end, they might learn a valuable lesson.

With pg, there's one thing I've come to rely on; he means well. There is
no requirement to agree with him on everything, but if over many years
you've watched him carefully, studied the things he's said and done, or
better, interacted with him, then you can be reasonably certain that he
means well.

If you know anything at all about Y-Combinator, then you already know
that Paul has far more important things to do than mess around with HN.
If you don't know the history of HN, you're at a disadvantage; it was
started as a for-fun side project to test out the ARC programming
language, and HN was originally called "Startup News" for a very good
reason -- to attract people with an interest in startups. The name was
eventually changed to "Hacker News" due to the retrospectively obvious
oversight; a lot of the best coders haven't really thought about doing a
startup, and the people interested in startups are often already doing
one. Broadening the scope of appeal with the name change makes sense.

If you haven't read everything Paul has written, then you don't about
the massive amount of time and effort he's put into thinking about the
interactions between people on (open) forums, and how to encourage
beneficial exchanges between (potentially conflicting) people. HN is
now, and always has been, an ongoing experiment to improve the ratio of
beneficial exchanges in discussions, as well as reduce human moderation
overhead. It's fun watching it evolve.

And lastly no, of the small bits of HN secret sauce I've discovered over
the years, I absolutely refuse to give you the details. If the details
were public, then some people would use them to game the system.