[tomhow]

Can you share a link or any identifying words that would enable us to know exactly what you're referring to? Dang and I monitor this site throughout the day, every day, and we have no idea what you mean. If it was a "prominent AMA" that we "hosted", we would remember.

[rsoto2]

It was on the front page(I want to say the January after Oct 7), and has since been scrubbed along with the many comments I made on it.

Here is me referencing it about 11 months ago and I have older comments that reference it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864419#44866331

I guess HN likes to scrub things that make them look bad instead of confronting the reality that they helped launder and "humanize" genocide.

[tomhow]

I'm not sure how it's plausible that we would (1) want to host something like what you're describing, and then (2) completely scrub it and pretend it never happened.

We don't ever delete anything from HN (except in rare cases where a user asks us to do so for privacy reasons). If we had deleted something as controversial/inflammatory as what you're claiming, it would easily be exposed; the HN API is public and many people ingest and store everything that is posted, so someone would have a record of it and could easily dig it up. That's aside from any cached copies in The Internet Archive, any screenshots of it, any tweets about it, etc. We never even consider trying to hide anything that's happened on HN, because it would so easily be exposed if we did. If something bad happens on HN, we own it and work to improve.

Edit:

The thread you must be referring to is this, in January 2024:

ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043 - Jan 2024 (1401 comments)

This comment, which appears near the bottom of the thread, is from someone identifying as an IDF soldier and sharing their perspective: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39147721. That user posted 9 comments in a thread with 1401 comments. Most of the replies to them were hostile but attracted no moderator action. Some of your replies attracted user flags and comments from dang due to breaking the guidelines. This is routine moderation. The guidelines apply, regardless of the topic; otherwise there would be no point having guidelines, and we'd never be able to have discussions about any difficult topics at all.

The main topic and the overwhelming majority of comments in the thread were critical of the IDF.

[rsoto2]

My mistake you are correct. I will edit my previous comments

[tomhow]

Thank you. If you would like to edit past comments, you can email us ([e-mail]) and we can work with you to correct the record.

[rsoto2]

Thanks and apologies for the grief. I have replied at least to the parent comment from this thread to correct myself. I mentioned it I think two previous times and I didn't realize you couldn't reply to old comments. I'll send an email

[rsoto2]

Also, the mods were heavily in the thread and flagged most of my comments calling the soldier a war criminal. I wonder how many ex-IDF have worked at ycombinator companies.

[tomhow]

The guidelines apply regardless of the topic, and regardless of who you're replying to. There's no point having guidelines if we only apply them in cases where it's popular.

For the record, this is the comment that dang replied to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39158222.