I'm starting to wonder if comments posted on HN are examined by algorithms and automatically downvoted. Like an attempt to mute stupidity and block malice.
Has anyone noticed this with comments they've posted?
Personally, I downvote destructive comments and flag harmful ones. My impression is that others do the same. I've never seen anything to suggest that there is algorithm beyond those that affect community members under shadow bans. My understanding is that people wind up in that state by hand, but I have no direct knowledge.
Thank you for this. I hadn't realized there is a difference between downvoting and flagging comments until I read your post. I hope other HN users know of this difference.
There are a lot of people on HN, and a lot of people with downvote privilege, and there are a lot of people who just generally downvote because they disagree with something.
Even if your opinion is completely positive, if people disagree, and a lot of people see it, you will get downvoted just because they disagree (and no one will reply to your comment to disagree, it's a drive-by-downvote).
There's also verification of this by HN mods: Several comment threads exist where they keep increasing the downvote threshold (from 300, to 400, to 500, and beyond). But it still doesn't solve the problem.
I find that really annoying when people downvote a comment because they don't agree with it. IMO, the downvoting privilege should be used only to indicate a flawed argumentation or negative content.
My own post was taken down before, so I'm pretty sure some form of censorship exists. I don't know if it's enforced by mods or implemented otherwise, but that's a minor point.
We go out of our way not to kill stories and comments that are critical of YC or YC-funded startups. When such posts break the HN guidelines, we may penalize them, but always less than we would if the story were about something else. That's a pretty big deal around here—it's literally the first rule of HN moderation.
Beyond that, we'd need to know what post you're talking about.
If you'd like to provide a link, we can look into it.
Lots of software affects both story and comment rankings.
"Poison" is a rather tendentious way to describe that. HN's goal is high quality in all things, to the extent it's possible. That doesn't just happen by default; systems are necessary, and it gets harder as numbers grow.
there was a decidedly sexist article overnight (1AM-ish PST) which I (apparently among many others) flagged... and it was gone within a couple of minutes!