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> It'll end up offending and driving away people with interesting ideas. So it hasn't happened yet, in the 7+ years the site has been running? When will it ha

• dang 12y ago
  If by "making comments disappear" the GP means the fading out of downvoted comments, that's unlikely to go away for the reason you mention. But if instead the GP means the switching of massively downvoted comments to [dead] status (so only users with "showdead" set to "yes" in their profiles would see them), that's an experiment we were running, which I described above. I doubt we'll keep it.
  • SamReidHughes 12y ago
    Oh, okay. I think the GP meant the latter and I misinterpreted him or overlooked the distinction. In my mind getting massively faded out makes you about just as disappeared as being [dead]. At least from the perspective of reading the thread, it's approximately the same thing, and I thought . But considering the perspective of writing a comment, though: I've gotten a lot angrier when a comment (on Reddit) was deleted than when some HN comment was faded away. This is the second time I've seen downvoting-to-[dead] affect some of the weirder people on HN in a way that seems to violate the principle of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAg7AmyG2Ys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAg7AmyG2Ys . There are some other threads in the past (the justin.tv suicide maybe) where I've seen simply unpopular worldviews get downvoted and it would have been a shame for them to be [dead].
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  • smt88 12y ago
    I was referring to the experiment (switching to [dead] status). I don't think fading out is a big deal.