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If you want to see what's been "moderated" away from you on Hacker News: Click your username at the upper right: Turn on "showdead": showdead: yes. (defaults

If you want to see what's been "moderated" away from you on Hacker News: Click your username at the upper right: Turn on "showdead": showdead: yes. (defaults to "no") There are a number of dead posts in this thread. I'd post some here (some of which don't appear to violate any HN guidelines, I'll note), but probably those same moderators would kill this one, too.

IncreasePosts 2y ago
Presumably those accounts are dead because of repeated rule breaking, not because their specific post in this thread broke the rules. And there might be more dead comments here on average because politics+tech draws a lot of a certain type of commenter(the type of commenter that might get banned)
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  "Presumably" ?? which ones? How do you know?
  - shitpostbot 2y ago
    [dead]
  - generalizations 2y ago
    It's a fairly safe prior - Dang does a pretty great job moderating here & I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
  - 13415 2y ago
    People generally know from participating in moderation because they flag comments and posts themselves.
  - usefulcat 2y ago
    Some context on a user (bigbacaloa) who made one of the dead comments you've referred to elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37381905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37381905
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    It's possible to search for moderator replies (dang, earlier sctb and pg) to specific userIDs with the syntax: https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=<CommentUserID>&by=<ReplyUserID> E.g., dang's replies to bigbacaloa: <https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=bigbacaloa&by=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=bigbacaloa&by=dang> That (presently) turns up two admonishments dating back 11 months and two years: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37423572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37423572> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33132910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33132910>. The first of those (11 months ago) is where the account was banned. If you have specific questions on accounts, users, sites, comments, posts, etc., which you feel are improperly flagged, killed, or banned, you can always email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com. I do this frequently, usually with suggestions (e.g., title or URL changes), sometimes with questions (earlier today a site which showed up dead, turns out it's a hard paywall, which I eventually tracked down dang's comment on, though not in an easily-searchable way).
- canadianfella 2y ago
  [dead]
sangnoir 2y ago
HN allows everyone with sufficient karma to vouch for dead comments (or flag comments), I suspect most of the comment-level moderation you see is crowdsourced to fellow commenters; a still-dead comment means most of those who see choose to keep it dead. HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including bans); any unmoderated forum devolves into a cesspit; and it only takes a surprisingly few bad apples to ruin a community.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  That's the gospel, for sure. However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit."
  - margalabargala 2y ago
    > However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit." This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread with hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in good faith. Looking at a selection of dead comments on this thread, I see flame-baiting on israel/palestine, flame-baiting on trans and racial issues, assorted comments whose content might have been acceptable if it wasn't 40% profanity by wordcount, a bunch of unnecessary personal attacks, and assorted people redefining words and then asserting that only their new definition is the correct one. I see basically nothing that would improve HN if it were not dead. I see a lot that would make HN actively worse if it were not dead.
    - AlbertCory 2y ago
      > This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread with hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in good faith. No, it's not impossible. I count 15 dead now, not "hundreds" (when I said that originally, it was about 5). Let's make it easy: why does bigbacaloa's go, and all the others stay?
      - 2y ago
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
Of the four dead comments I see, two are content-free trolling and one is a completely unrelated discussion about Jim Jordan. The fourth is a bit more borderline, but I think a reasonable person could conclude that the commenter is more interested in getting people riled up than having a discussion.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  > The fourth is a bit more borderline The vast majority of comments on political/social topics fit your description. If you're thinking of the one I'm thinking of (not mine, if it matters), I can't think of any reasonable test that would conclude "this should be dead, but all those others can stay." Edit: it's bigbacaloa's
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    I agree that the vast majority of comments people would like to make on political/social topics violate the HN rules. Having seen political threads on Reddit, where any genuine insight is buried under a flood of namecalling and polemics, I think that's for the best.
    - AlbertCory 2y ago
      > the vast majority of comments people would like to make on political/social topics violate the HN rules Correction: delete the "would like to" Also, comparing this to Reddit is sort of Godwin's Rule transposed to a different domain. "Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick" is pretty much what you're saying.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - soneca 2y ago
    I took the time to find it and dig why they were banned. Here is dang’s explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421874 It sounds a fair banning for me.
cypress66 2y ago
I always use showdead. There's not a lot of dead comments, but I often (maybe 1 every 4) have to vouch for them.
bilekas 2y ago
It's very easy to claim censorship these days when in fact it's usually more benign than that, companies with large communities generally like to avoid anything inflammatory. Even still, like it or not, you don't have a right to say whatever you like most places on line. It's a privilege. Right or wrong that's just how it is.
- bilekas 2y ago
  Authors note : It's super interesting to see the sentiment on this comment. During EU hours, it was upvoted a surprising amount, and then when the US active time zones come in, it's downvoted pretty significantly. What a beautiful little bellwether from a place (hn) where I appreciate the discourse I really appreciate. I actually expected the opposite.
feoren 2y ago
[Dead] means they've been downvoted to oblivion. Moderators had nothing to do with it -- those were other users on HN. I always browse with "showdead" on and the vast majority of [Dead] posts are awful. They don't need to violate HN Guidelines, they were killed by the community. [Flagged] means it was killed by a moderator. Those are more rare. I don't agree with everything that is flagged but I think HN has a great moderation policy overall. Often when posts are flagged, the moderator responds explaining why.
- philipkglass 2y ago
  Comments cannot be hidden by downvoting. Comments are marked [flagged] [dead] only after other users have clicked on the timestamp and selected "flag." I think that these things get conflated because comments that tend to attract heavy downvotes also attract flagging. The [flagged] [dead] comments are mostly (entirely?) killed by the actions of ordinary users, not moderators. Comments that are marked [dead] without the [flagged] indicator are because the user that posted the comment has been banned. For green (new) accounts this can be due to automatic filters that threw up false positives for new accounts. For old accounts this shows that the account has been banned by moderators. Users who have been banned can email hn@ycombinator.com pledging to follow the rules in the future and they'll be granted another chance. Even if a user remains banned, you can unhide a good [dead] comment by clicking on its timestamp and clicking "vouch."
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    It's usually possible to find the banning event using the "replies" HN endpoint: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41375637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41375637>
- wredue 2y ago
  Flagged 100% does not need moderator involvement. Even being post restricted needs no moderator involvement. I have had no shortage of comments flagged by a certain group of people that like their “alternate facts” and share their HN posts to discord for brigading / mass down voting anyone that calls their lies out. It only takes 2-3 quick user flags for your comment to be permanently, automatically flagged, and only a couple of those to get comment restricted.
bbqfog 2y ago
[flagged]
- dang 2y ago
  HN has had plenty of major threads on Israel-related topics. Your submissions are getting flagged and moderated, not because they're Israel-related, but because you're using the site primarily for political battle and flamewar. In fact it looks like you've been using HN exclusively for that. We ban accounts that do that, whichever side of whichever issue they're doing it about, because it goes completely against the intended spirit of the site. That ought to be obvious to anyone who has read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I'm not going to ban you right now, but if you keep this up, we're going to have to.
simonmysun 2y ago
Thanks for sharing this, otherwise I may never know tge meanings of the terms on HN. I hope there was a guide. Meanwhile I saw a dead post 0 minutes ago, is is true that someone flagged it immediately? I personally don't find the post evil but only little boring.
- throwup238 2y ago
  If they've been flag killed, it will say [flagged][dead] (and yes I've seen it happen within a minute of someone commenting on very popular threads). If it's just [dead], you should look at their comment history because chances are they've been banned by dang. Alternatively, some people register on HN via Tor which also auto-shadowbans them until enough people vouch for their comments.
  - simonmysun 2y ago
    Thx for the explanation. It was just [dead]. And it's an Show HN post and is the only post from a new user. I guess Tor was the reason.
seydor 2y ago
I don't think they are removed by moderators, they are flagged. HN is a small community , and frankly more moderate than everywhere else (except twitter these days). Sadly, censorship in 2024 is coming by the people, for the people.
thom 2y ago
Hacker News is the only online community that doesn't feel like it's actively driving me insane. Whatever censorship is being done, whether in good or bad faith, I'm all for it.
shadowgovt 2y ago
I would, but then I'd have to read comments that peers on this site have decided aren't worth my time, and more often than not they're right.
andrewmcwatters 2y ago
You can't see which users Dan has down-weighed. Their posts are not autodead, but their comments decay rapidly to the bottom of threads.
grogenaut 2y ago
I did this. I spent 10 minutes diffing, only a few things weren't listed. One was just full of cursing and not a useful piece of discussion. Another was a comment claiming that Trans was a concept made up 2 years ago. So far seems working as intended. What might be more useful is to get your nerd hat on and run a few diffs through sentiment analysis and post that as a topic. I'd definitely read a ML / Sentiment Analysis / Bias analysis type document, would be a great topic.

IncreasePosts 2y ago

Presumably those accounts are dead because of repeated rule breaking, not because their specific post in this thread broke the rules. And there might be more dead comments here on average because politics+tech draws a lot of a certain type of commenter(the type of commenter that might get banned)

AlbertCory 2y ago
"Presumably" ?? which ones? How do you know?
- shitpostbot 2y ago
  [dead]
- generalizations 2y ago
  It's a fairly safe prior - Dang does a pretty great job moderating here & I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
- 13415 2y ago
  People generally know from participating in moderation because they flag comments and posts themselves.
- usefulcat 2y ago
  Some context on a user (bigbacaloa) who made one of the dead comments you've referred to elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37381905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37381905
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  It's possible to search for moderator replies (dang, earlier sctb and pg) to specific userIDs with the syntax: https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=<CommentUserID>&by=<ReplyUserID> E.g., dang's replies to bigbacaloa: <https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=bigbacaloa&by=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=bigbacaloa&by=dang> That (presently) turns up two admonishments dating back 11 months and two years: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37423572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37423572> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33132910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33132910>. The first of those (11 months ago) is where the account was banned. If you have specific questions on accounts, users, sites, comments, posts, etc., which you feel are improperly flagged, killed, or banned, you can always email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com. I do this frequently, usually with suggestions (e.g., title or URL changes), sometimes with questions (earlier today a site which showed up dead, turns out it's a hard paywall, which I eventually tracked down dang's comment on, though not in an easily-searchable way).
canadianfella 2y ago
[dead]

sangnoir 2y ago

HN allows everyone with sufficient karma to vouch for dead comments (or flag comments), I suspect most of the comment-level moderation you see is crowdsourced to fellow commenters; a still-dead comment means most of those who see choose to keep it dead. HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including bans); any unmoderated forum devolves into a cesspit; and it only takes a surprisingly few bad apples to ruin a community.

AlbertCory 2y ago
That's the gospel, for sure. However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit."
- margalabargala 2y ago
  > However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit." This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread with hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in good faith. Looking at a selection of dead comments on this thread, I see flame-baiting on israel/palestine, flame-baiting on trans and racial issues, assorted comments whose content might have been acceptable if it wasn't 40% profanity by wordcount, a bunch of unnecessary personal attacks, and assorted people redefining words and then asserting that only their new definition is the correct one. I see basically nothing that would improve HN if it were not dead. I see a lot that would make HN actively worse if it were not dead.
  - AlbertCory 2y ago
    > This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread with hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in good faith. No, it's not impossible. I count 15 dead now, not "hundreds" (when I said that originally, it was about 5). Let's make it easy: why does bigbacaloa's go, and all the others stay?
    - 2y ago

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

Of the four dead comments I see, two are content-free trolling and one is a completely unrelated discussion about Jim Jordan. The fourth is a bit more borderline, but I think a reasonable person could conclude that the commenter is more interested in getting people riled up than having a discussion.

AlbertCory 2y ago
> The fourth is a bit more borderline The vast majority of comments on political/social topics fit your description. If you're thinking of the one I'm thinking of (not mine, if it matters), I can't think of any reasonable test that would conclude "this should be dead, but all those others can stay." Edit: it's bigbacaloa's
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  I agree that the vast majority of comments people would like to make on political/social topics violate the HN rules. Having seen political threads on Reddit, where any genuine insight is buried under a flood of namecalling and polemics, I think that's for the best.
  - AlbertCory 2y ago
    > the vast majority of comments people would like to make on political/social topics violate the HN rules Correction: delete the "would like to" Also, comparing this to Reddit is sort of Godwin's Rule transposed to a different domain. "Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick" is pretty much what you're saying.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- soneca 2y ago
  I took the time to find it and dig why they were banned. Here is dang’s explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421874 It sounds a fair banning for me.

cypress66 2y ago

I always use showdead. There's not a lot of dead comments, but I often (maybe 1 every 4) have to vouch for them.

bilekas 2y ago

It's very easy to claim censorship these days when in fact it's usually more benign than that, companies with large communities generally like to avoid anything inflammatory. Even still, like it or not, you don't have a right to say whatever you like most places on line. It's a privilege. Right or wrong that's just how it is.

bilekas 2y ago
Authors note : It's super interesting to see the sentiment on this comment. During EU hours, it was upvoted a surprising amount, and then when the US active time zones come in, it's downvoted pretty significantly. What a beautiful little bellwether from a place (hn) where I appreciate the discourse I really appreciate. I actually expected the opposite.

feoren 2y ago

[Dead] means they've been downvoted to oblivion. Moderators had nothing to do with it -- those were other users on HN. I always browse with "showdead" on and the vast majority of [Dead] posts are awful. They don't need to violate HN Guidelines, they were killed by the community. [Flagged] means it was killed by a moderator. Those are more rare. I don't agree with everything that is flagged but I think HN has a great moderation policy overall. Often when posts are flagged, the moderator responds explaining why.

philipkglass 2y ago
Comments cannot be hidden by downvoting. Comments are marked [flagged] [dead] only after other users have clicked on the timestamp and selected "flag." I think that these things get conflated because comments that tend to attract heavy downvotes also attract flagging. The [flagged] [dead] comments are mostly (entirely?) killed by the actions of ordinary users, not moderators. Comments that are marked [dead] without the [flagged] indicator are because the user that posted the comment has been banned. For green (new) accounts this can be due to automatic filters that threw up false positives for new accounts. For old accounts this shows that the account has been banned by moderators. Users who have been banned can email hn@ycombinator.com pledging to follow the rules in the future and they'll be granted another chance. Even if a user remains banned, you can unhide a good [dead] comment by clicking on its timestamp and clicking "vouch."
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  It's usually possible to find the banning event using the "replies" HN endpoint: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41375637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41375637>
wredue 2y ago
Flagged 100% does not need moderator involvement. Even being post restricted needs no moderator involvement. I have had no shortage of comments flagged by a certain group of people that like their “alternate facts” and share their HN posts to discord for brigading / mass down voting anyone that calls their lies out. It only takes 2-3 quick user flags for your comment to be permanently, automatically flagged, and only a couple of those to get comment restricted.

bbqfog 2y ago

[flagged]

dang 2y ago
HN has had plenty of major threads on Israel-related topics. Your submissions are getting flagged and moderated, not because they're Israel-related, but because you're using the site primarily for political battle and flamewar. In fact it looks like you've been using HN exclusively for that. We ban accounts that do that, whichever side of whichever issue they're doing it about, because it goes completely against the intended spirit of the site. That ought to be obvious to anyone who has read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I'm not going to ban you right now, but if you keep this up, we're going to have to.

simonmysun 2y ago

Thanks for sharing this, otherwise I may never know tge meanings of the terms on HN. I hope there was a guide. Meanwhile I saw a dead post 0 minutes ago, is is true that someone flagged it immediately? I personally don't find the post evil but only little boring.

throwup238 2y ago
If they've been flag killed, it will say [flagged][dead] (and yes I've seen it happen within a minute of someone commenting on very popular threads). If it's just [dead], you should look at their comment history because chances are they've been banned by dang. Alternatively, some people register on HN via Tor which also auto-shadowbans them until enough people vouch for their comments.
- simonmysun 2y ago
  Thx for the explanation. It was just [dead]. And it's an Show HN post and is the only post from a new user. I guess Tor was the reason.

seydor 2y ago

I don't think they are removed by moderators, they are flagged. HN is a small community , and frankly more moderate than everywhere else (except twitter these days). Sadly, censorship in 2024 is coming by the people, for the people.

thom 2y ago

Hacker News is the only online community that doesn't feel like it's actively driving me insane. Whatever censorship is being done, whether in good or bad faith, I'm all for it.

shadowgovt 2y ago

I would, but then I'd have to read comments that peers on this site have decided aren't worth my time, and more often than not they're right.

andrewmcwatters 2y ago

You can't see which users Dan has down-weighed. Their posts are not autodead, but their comments decay rapidly to the bottom of threads.

grogenaut 2y ago

I did this. I spent 10 minutes diffing, only a few things weren't listed. One was just full of cursing and not a useful piece of discussion. Another was a comment claiming that Trans was a concept made up 2 years ago. So far seems working as intended. What might be more useful is to get your nerd hat on and run a few diffs through sentiment analysis and post that as a topic. I'd definitely read a ML / Sentiment Analysis / Bias analysis type document, would be a great topic.