zlacker

>>southe+(OP)
If you want to see what's been "moderated" away from you on Hacker News:

Click your username at the upper right:

Turn on "showdead": showdead: yes. (defaults to "no")

There are a number of dead posts in this thread. I'd post some here (some of which don't appear to violate any HN guidelines, I'll note), but probably those same moderators would kill this one, too.

>>Albert+dY
HN allows everyone with sufficient karma to vouch for dead comments (or flag comments), I suspect most of the comment-level moderation you see is crowdsourced to fellow commenters; a still-dead comment means most of those who see choose to keep it dead.

HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including bans); any unmoderated forum devolves into a cesspit; and it only takes a surprisingly few bad apples to ruin a community.

>>sangno+501
That's the gospel, for sure.

However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit."

>>Albert+f11
Sometimes, the actual mods in charge of the site have heavily penalized certain accounts, either manually or via an algorithm (I don't know the details). The comments posted by these accounts appear to start off "dead", though they may be vouched for by high-karma users. This will make those comments appear normally.

I've moderated a number of forums in my time. And the hardest users to deal with are the ones that insist on breaking the rules 10% of the time, and who refuse to stop. Even if they contribute positively much of the rest of the time, they create far too much work.

(Also, I have zero interest in participating in unmoderated forums. Unmoderated forums are either overrun by spam, or by users who somehow manage to spend 50 hours a week flaming people. Look at any small-town online newspaper where the same 5 people bicker endlessly after every single news story. And if I don't like how a forum is moderated, I find another one.)