[LexiMax]

> Here on HN bothsidesism is a shibboleth that denotes "I'm a Serious Commenter and not a Partisan Hack".

HN users don't necessarily do that because they want to. They might do it as a pre-emptive defense mechanism against the brigades of de-facto censors that roam the site.

Moderation via populism is an anti-feature on its face, but Hacker News has the worst possible version of that sort of feature by making downvoted/flagged comments completely hidden unless you are logged in and showdead.

It's a pretty horrendous system if you're interested in good faith and honest debate.

[ImPostingOnHN]

I have showdead enabled, and in my experience, the only dead comments are ones which violate the site guidelines or are otherwise Bad Posts regardless of the political affiliation of the poster. Stuff like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689291

[NoGravitas]

I have showdead enabled, and ime it's a pretty fair split between truly bad comments and merely unpopular ones. I use the vouch button pretty often.

[LexiMax]

I also have showdead enabled and in any remotely controversial thread, among the uncontroversial Bad Posts you will find a reasonable number of posts that are well argued and have effort put into them, but get downvoted anyway.

There are a number of reasonable posts in this very thread that are either already dead or on their way out - and I don't even agree with some of their positions.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Maybe some examples from this thread of the actually dead ones?

[Karrot_Kream]

Any post bringing up any context behind CZ's behavior that makes crypto or CZ not sound bad is getting downvoted.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Maybe some examples from this thread of the actually dead ones?

[ajross]

The fact that this arguable, but clearly reasoned and expressed comment is now deep gray kinda puts an exclamation point on the argument, I'd say.

(Honestly I think the moderation paradigm at HN has some bad externalities too, but really this isn't a solvable problem in the general case and nowhere does it well. The showdead mechanism at least makes the censorship visible to those who know where to look.)

[LexiMax]

It does. And it's completely understandable why, from a game theory point of view.

The censors want Hacker News to keep its reputation as a place where you can have debates in good faith, while allowing their censorship powers to shape the conversation.

Pointing this behavior out upsets the calculus by warning their potential marks. So of course they want to strategically hide it.