3 ms·

There's still a lot of illicit activity visible with "showdead", e.g. sites offering sales of reviews, including negative reviews. I don't see why sites with

• dang 7y ago
  It's valuable for us to be able to tell the community "you can see everything that gets killed if you want to". Many HN users want to decide for themselves how good a job we (moderators, software, user flags, etc.) do of deciding what should get killed vs. not. If some posts got blanked out altogether, that would no longer be possible, and then we'd get complaints about "unaccountable moderators censoring things they don't like", etc. We get those anyway, but the showdead setting helps to mitigate them and keep the bulk of the community satisfied. We'd lose a lot of good faith if we changed that. Of course if we added a second level of deadness, we could add a "show-dead-dead" setting to make it visible, but that would be too complicated. Edit: I should add that there HN also has deletion, meaning a post is no longer visible even to users with showdead on, but we only do that when the author of a post has requested it, or (in extremely rare cases) because our lawyers told us we had to.
  • masonic 7y ago
    if we added a second level of deadness, we could add a "show-dead-dead" setting You could have a "Trash bin" subcategory into which the titles/metadata of submits that deserve being rendered unnavigable (porn, fraud, malware links) go. Transparency is retained while users are protected. For example, when Craigslist deletes an ad, the link remains clickable and shows only "this listing has been flagged for removal" if you click it.