It's well established in multiple threads that people downvote and flag views they find unacceptable and has nothing to do with guidelines.

The world will always include bad actors. That doesn't mean we should encourage or tolerate bad behavior.

Whatever gets you through the night.

HN commenters are turning this place into another safe space. Contrary views are not tolerated.

Considering the animated discussions from a wide variety of positions, I'm not seeing what you are. I do see strong bias against overly aggressive and uncivil behavior. I also see a few members who have a hard time seeing beyond their own bias. It's natural to be more aware of behavior against your own "side". It's just one of our cognitive biases we need to be aware of and guard against.

Comment and submission data is available via the HN APIs. Put together an analysis and share your methodology and results. Regardless of your findings, I know I'd be interested in seeing them. I'm sure a lot of other HN members would be, too.

Are you even reading? Some posts are not even allowed to be listed by the mods here. They don't show up dead, they just don't show up at all.

I pay pretty close attention. I browse with showdead on. Can you clarify what you mean by "don't show up at all"? Posts by banned users are dead as soon as they're posted, but I think you mean something else. Do you have a couple of examples of what you're talking about?

Mods will occasionally detach subthreads, and have even been known to remove them from a story.

As one might imagine, a subthread without even a story parent is basically inaccessible unless you know its precise ID.

Well it's not known to me. What makes you say that? We don't delete comments or posts like this, but if you know of specific cases we can certainly take a look.

You...do appreciate the difficulty in finding these instances if they weren't bookmarked at the time, right? Also, just how silly it is to have the alleged censors say "Oh, well, that's news to me--can you find examples of the things we memoryholed?"

It might help if you folks kept a public moderation log.

I don't think it's unfair to ask someone to back up a claim, especially when the dataset is publicly available through the API or (more conveniently) in BigQuery:

  SELECT count(*) FROM [bigquery-public-data:hacker_news.comments] 
  WHERE parent IS NULL;

Story and comment IDs are also simply incrementing integers. We're not making it easy on ourselves to hide this sort of thing!

Oh nifty. When did you all add that stuff to BigQuery? The Firebase API suggests that that dataset is going away in like a month.