That was before I started working on HN, so I don't have any inside details. But I'll give you my take on what I think happened, based on the time I did spend working with pg on the site. I need a few minutes though--there's another comment pending on my stack. Will come back and edit this.

(Edit: I haven't forgotten, but have to run out to an appointment, so this will need to wait for another hour or two. Sorry about that.)

Edit: back now. My gut feeling is that PG might not have had enough time to look into all the details. I say that because June 2012 was about the peak of when HN moderation was extremely time-constrained (I started a few months later) and the only option was to enforce the guidelines generically.

It's cool. I'm just curious about your take since, by necessity, you get to see far more comments than I do and get to see patterns that I may miss completely.

For the record, I don't think he deserved a hellbanning, but then again, this was a while ago. And the wild west hadn't probably settled yet.

I think you could, when Paul Graham was actively moderating the site, get hellbanned for unproductively pissing Paul Graham off. I think it happened more than once.

This is still true, and will always be true.

If a moderator has a button "ban", and you piss them off enough, you'll get banned.

Give people buttons, and they'll use them. Probably more than they actually should.

> The guidelines (as you probably already knew) also say that if you have a question about moderation, send us an email instead of posting about it on the site.

So it sounds like got banned for refusing to follow the guidelines?

On that very page:

Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com.

Dan beat me to it.

I'll admit it could be clearer but it has always been there since that page went up as far as I'm aware. Ctrl+F for hn@