[viklove]

Yes, it appears that way because of the way the moderation works. Comments that HN wants to be hidden just get sent to the bottom of the comment stack, then grayed out, then hidden. You probably believe that only comments that users downvote get sent to the bottom, but no, there is a secret rating system controlled by the mods that causes certain comments to behave as if they were already downvoted. It's an opaque system that is selectively applied so as to conceal its nature.

If the system were honest and fair, the mods would have no reason to hide their behavior.

Now I have to be careful, I've posted 3 comments in the last hour and I'm running up against my rate limit since the mods have highlighted me as a troublemaker. Can't say too much exposing the secret system of moderation here, they don't like that.

[AnimalMuppet]

This sounds like conspiracy theory stuff. There's this secret bad stuff that I know about, but you don't because "they" hide the evidence.

So, how do you know? What is your objectively verifiable evidence that this secret system exists?

Or are you just referring to the editors' ability to kill a post that they deem to be against the site guidelines? They have that power, but it's not a secret.

[viklove]

It's not that hard to notice, there's just no official documentation or explanation of what these mechanics are and that's the extent of how "secret" it is. I think if you search dang's comment history he mentions it a few times, and obviously if you look for anecdotes you'll find plenty of users on this platform that have been rate limited, and deprioritized on other ways to have their opinions filtered out of the conversation.

Selective moderation is also a big problem on this platform. Rules only apply to certain groups of people, basically at dang's discretion.

The biggest problem with this platform is that there is no moderation log. The mod team works in an opaque manner, making it hard to prove or disprove the claims I was making. If we could just see a list of all comments dang had deleted, and the true vote count of each comment, we could all see exactly what the mod team was doing and be confident in its fairness.

That's obviously not the case though, and HN keeps this information from us to protect their image.