That filth you linked to is scored 0, which I think means it is not visible by default. I think it is preferable to leave stuff like that available-but-hidden rather than to delete it altogether. Free speech is a virtue.
Hard disagree. That comment isn't contributing to dialog, even of the heated variety. It's hatred for the sake of hatred, and I don't think there's a place for it.
I'm happy to debate with earnest people I disagree with. That's interesting, and done well, we can both learn from it. There's no value in repulsiveness for the sake of repulsiveness. I don't expect a forum mod to be on top of every single comment ever made, but when things like what I linked are reported but stay up, the moderators are saying, yeah, we're fine with spending server resources to host that.
Slashdot has always had firm political leanings that include opposition to censorship. And stupid conspiracy theories always claim they’re being suppressed, which thrives when they can point to it actually happening.
To the contrary, there's a lot of evidence that deplatforming actually works. In this case, it's not about getting rid of uncivil users, but dropping blatant trash. There are any number of website willing to host that filth. Why give them an additional platform out of a misguided sense of ideological purity, saying that horridly racist trolling is just as valid as any other content?
You've kinda lost track of object reality there: "Only logged in users who are deliberately un-hiding this content" is hardly "as valid as any other content".
Slashdot's attitude is that things which are "removed" (voted to zero) ought to be auditable. This means everyone knows what the rules REALLY are (as opposed to what people SAY they are), and it also prevents the system from being abused (since you can trivially link to examples of that abuse)
I really don't think an auditable record of moderation decisions is that bad, and you have to understand that this is NOT "content that is presented to regular users." I don't remember my login anymore, so I can't even figure out how to see the comment you linked - I'm sure if I logged in and reset myself to view negative scores I COULD see it, since I've used the site before, but it is distinctly non-trivial to do so.
It looks like there's a slider at the head of the comments section controlling which comments are displayed with their text, which comments are "abbreviated", and which aren't visible at all. The line between abbreviated and hidden is defaulting to a position just less than 1, so a comment with a score of 0 has no representation on the page other than an indicator somewhere in the comment thread saying "[n] hidden comment(s)".
The comment will become visible (in abbreviated form) if you drag that slider over to just less than 0 (and load all the comments).
kstrauser is definitely choosing to see the comment.
I’m definitely not. I copied and pasted that link into a freshly cleared out Duck Duck Go browser window on my phone and saw the comment. I can’t reproduce not seeing it in any browser I’ve tried, except where I had an ad blocker installed that hides website comments.
Turns out I did, but I still know that when browsing a Slashdot thread, it will auto-hide Score 0 comments. I'm also noticing that thread is from four years ago (2018), and has hundreds of comments (605!) so you'd have really had to dig for that example.
I'm happy to debate with earnest people I disagree with. That's interesting, and done well, we can both learn from it. There's no value in repulsiveness for the sake of repulsiveness. I don't expect a forum mod to be on top of every single comment ever made, but when things like what I linked are reported but stay up, the moderators are saying, yeah, we're fine with spending server resources to host that.