Eh. I think that's a little unfair on us HNers. I have seen comments like that. But I've also seen a lot of comments about how the H1b visas should be more flexible and widely available so as to give visa holders more freedom.

the problem is that those comments are never downvoted. they are ALWAYS upvoted.

so is it unfair to say a community that mostly upvotes plain xenophobic comments has an issue?

and it's not from now -- i've been here for a while and every single time h1b is mentioned, there are upvoted comments saying weird stuff that is never removed.

> those comments are never downvoted. they are ALWAYS upvoted

That's far from the case. You might be running into the notice/dislike bias, which unfortunately tends to distort perceptions and leads to false feelings of generality.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

From there it leads to painful feelings about the community, which is particularly unfortunate. I wrote about this earlier today in a different context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24701584.

Hi, I'm just commenting here because I don't know any alternative way to reach the moderation of hacker news. There was a thread earlier today on the topic of "Ask HN: what do you consider to be essential to being a good programmer" and it vanished in the middle of me having typed out a long response. I couldn't find it afterwards. Do you know where it went or why it was removed?

It’s currently at the top of the “ask” page - https://news.ycombinator.com/ask

It also appears via this search:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=fals...

> I don't know any alternative way to reach the moderation of hacker news

This is explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, which is something everyone posting here should be familiar with. There is also a Contact link in the footer.