5 ms·

It is, quite literally, like comments disappear. That's intentional, not an exageration.

• WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  Well, if they did disappear completely, you'd have no way to retrieve their contents. They are extremely faded, true, but I've spent many of my childhood years watching cartoons on an old B&W television set with an extremely faded CRT, so I may be a bit desensitized. I'm not overflowing with boundless adoration for the HN forums (I've heard someone calling them "like Reddit, but made of galaxy brains" and it made me laugh out loud) and feel that the overall crowd here does display certain biases and flaws (myself included, of course), and that it has a set of wrongthink taboos for which you can be downvoted into oblivion, but at least there is a setting which will show you the downvoted, flagged, and dead comments at all so you can see for yourself and make your own judgement if it was fair. Unsurprisingly, most of the flagged/dead content is a sort of toilet humor, or some memespeak interjections devoid of content at all. Some messages are interesting, but they are few and far between. (I enjoy reading dead/flagged stuff nevertheless.) There exist forums which moderate messages in a way that the inconvenient/wrongthink/irrelevant/taboo/spam content disappears along with all the replies, as if it never appeared there. I doubt you'd want it quite like that.