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A comment on Usually I agree with the moderating, but .... Parent comment

Re:Usually I agree with the moderating, but ... by Jun8 on Thursday May 20, 2010 @03:15PM (#1364980)
Thanks for the tip, just turned it on and now I can see the question. There must be a lot of HNers like me who don't know this, though.

I cannot understand the point of hiding deadened questions while still keeping the comments?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Usually I agree with the moderating, but ... by pohl on Thursday May 20, 2010 @04:05PM (#1365155)
I cannot understand the point of hiding deadened questions while still keeping the comments?

It makes sense to me. If the users flag & kill a link submitted by spammers, the spammers get no value from it because, by default, a spider won't be able to follow the HN page to the URL the spammers wanted to promote.

But keeping the comments helps users at HN get a feel for how the article was initially received.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Usually I agree with the moderating, but ... by steveklabnik on Thursday May 20, 2010 @03:24PM (#1365013)
> I cannot understand the point of hiding deadened questions while still keeping the comments?

It's all about removing the visibility. If the story is hidden, so are the comments, and so there's no reason to [dead] all of the comments too. The only way to see those comments is if you have showdead on anyway...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Usually I agree with the moderating, but ... by Jun8 on Thursday May 20, 2010 @03:37PM (#1365051)
That is not exactly true. When I browsed to the link given on this post with showdead off, I was still able to see the comments, which is weird.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Usually I agree with the moderating, but ... by steveklabnik on Thursday May 20, 2010 @03:57PM (#1365115)
What I meant was, without the direct link, you wouldn't have ever seen the story, not that the page would have 404d.
[ Parent | on HN ]