It seems like my comment was also vanished from the top of the thread? I don't see what guidelines I came even close to breaking. Help me out here? No one's going to see your reply, my comment is detached from the submission. But I do want to understand what's going on here.
That's a bit disingenuous isn't it? You're saying that the actual beef (vanishing Ask thread about google censorship) is okay to mention, and the reason my comment was silently nuked is because I happened to address the HN team? That's a bit strange.
I really do believe you have the best interests of the community in mind, but this chain of events is making it difficult. Using 'off topic' as an arbitrarily broad mechanism to remove high SnR content doesn't have the best optics, especially when a lot of the child discussion was pointing out seemingly inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of HN guidelines.
Again, help me out here. You're acting in good faith. Maybe a more clear and specific set of guidelines would help?
You're not going to tell me with a straight face that the highest upvoted comment on that submission and the origin of some healthy debate was 'off topic' when the top 3 comments of most front page submissions are far less related to TFA, are you?
I'm saying that what you posted was completely off topic, you shouldn't have posted it, and you should have emailed us instead (as indeed other users did). It's not that your comment was so bad in itself; it's the upvotes and replies that it attracted. They turned it into the worst subthread I've seen at the top of a high-ranked HN story in a long time.
If you think a subthread about "inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of HN guidelines", or rather people's feverish imaginations about that, doesn't qualify for being downweighted as off-topic, I'm not sure what to add. A subthread like that sitting at #1 on the #1 story of HN is a three-alarm fire from a moderation point of view. Smart readers don't come to HN to read that.
We routinely downweight this sort of thing because if we didn't, most threads would consist of nothing but. Do you think that HN discussions stay on topic (to the extent they do) by themselves? That would be a self-driving-cars-level achievement.
HN users will happily comment all day about HN, moderation, and their imaginings about these things. There's no stronger force on the site, but unfortunately it's an addictive process that burns all the oxygen from actual discussion and ends up asphyxiating it. A forum becoming self-referential like that is the road to death. If a smart new user showed up here, wanting to read about interesting topics, and ran into endless reams of insider bickering, they'd close the tab and never come back.
We 100% see where you're coming from. Would it be crazy to request that HN create a publicly available list of "marked off topic / down-weighted / removed / flagged as duplicate" actions? I feel like HN could squash 90% of these concerns with that simple feature.
The troubling issue here seems to be HN asking users to "keep it quiet" by sending an email rather than commenting publicly about valid concerns. But I get your point that those concerns are technically "off-topic" from the underlying thread itself.
For what its worth, I was also shocked to see your entire comment thread, with over 110 children I believe, deleted from the thread without mention. Before this, I thought HN handled deletion with graying out, [flagged] or [dead] etc.
I only found it again by checking @dang's profile.
I've also emailed HN support strongly objecting to this complete deletion.
I didn't delete it; I downweighted it. You're running into the pagination problem (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23184485), which is that you've confused the first page of comments with the entire thread. Click More at the bottom and you'll find it perfectly intact, just lower.
We don't delete things outright on HN unless the author asks us to. The most we ever do is 'kill' a post, meaning it's still visible to anyone with 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile, and even that's rare. Beyond that, we'd never kill an entire subthread with dozens of replies. We might downweight it or we might auto-collapse it. That's all. By the way, if I had actually deleted that thread, you'd not have been able to find it via my profile. I'm not sure whether to be more hurt by your assuming I'm such an evil censor or such a bad programmer. (<-- that is an attempt at a joke)
Thank you for clarifying - you can disregard my email! I don't think I've ever seen/clicked the More on comments and was unaware of that feature. I appreciate you taking the time to explain!
You're welcome! I understand the shock of it seeming like something has completely disappeared, which is one reason I want to get rid of that pagination, as soon as our software can handle that load.
