[vram22]

>Being dead doesn't censor anything. After all, I'm here reading and replying 10 hours later. It just makes it invisible to people without "Show dead" enabled.

IMO, effectively, it does censor it; not de jure, but de facto. (Hope I used those terms right, IANAL.)

Because my guess is that not many HN users know about the "showdead" setting. After all, not everyone is into tinkering with systems, tweaking settings, etc., even among developers, who I guess form a sizeable percentage of users here. Some of them just want to use the software as needed and get on with their lives, even though they may be technical.