I can't say about the others or all cases, as don't have the bird's eye view or ever have been a moderator, but do know that significant sections of threads can be removed (censored?). Recently I had made a comment in the "The bottom emoji breaks rust-analyzer" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34775549), that comment and others just vanished. My comment wasn't flagged. Just an entire section of comments (before and after) seem to have been removed. In those cases of heavy editing, for whatever reasons, there is nothing to link to for readers to see.

Additionally, when a thread is shadowbanned/ghostbanned, there is nothing for other readers to see as well. Only the creator, yourself, or possibly moderators can see. The public will not be able to see, so links to it serve no purpose. I'm just saying what I have personally observed, so don't know all the history or the behind the scenes. If something doesn't publicly exist anymore or is not accessible, there is nothing there for other readers to make up their minds about.

If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34788024, your comment was a reply to a comment that got flagged. Flagged subthreads are collapsed by default. They're still there, just in collapsed form.

I don't know what you mean by shadowbanned/ghostbanned but everything remains visible to users who have 'showdead' turned on in their profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

> there is nothing there for other readers to make up their minds about.

On the contrary - if people mention specific links, we can say exactly what happened to that link and this would allow readers to make up their own minds. Most "I got banned/censored" claims never supply the link because then they get to tell a one-sided, and usually entirely distorted, story.

Good rebuttal. However, many are not going to see the contents of flagged comments nor understand the decisions behind them being so. Not to say that flagging isn't justified at times, but scores of posts that are removed with it, are not guilty of the same violation or the poster may not even know what happened.

Agree that the OP should be able to provide a link to the shadowbanned thread, because of course you will be able to see it. The context of how shadowban or ghostban is used, is debatably valid. Because the user can see the thread, but it's no longer obviously available to the public.

As for showdead, seems doubtful that many would have it turned on or even be looking. Once a thread drops out of sight (likely top 100), seems most won't check (even more so if no comments) unless they are searching for something specific (which could be anything).

I agree with most of your points here. The thing to understand is that these are all tradeoffs. For example, it's true that collapsing flagged subthreads by default is unfair to the users who post substantive comments in that subtree and haven't broken the site guidelines. (Sometimes we rectify this by manually snipping them, so they can go back to the top level, if we see them and they make just as much sense at the top level.) However, it's still a major improvement to thread quality overall to collapse flagged subthreads by default. Moderation is fraught with these tradeoffs, and when we find any major improvement to overall quality, we pretty much have to do it. In this sense we're basically all victims of statistics here.

Re https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838236: that got hit by a simple spam filter. Clearly it was a false positive (another tradeoff—no spam filters without false positives). Sorry! I've restored it now*. The funny thing is, I was just looking at that particular filter this afternoon and realized it might need some work—I just haven't had time to review it yet, which involves looking at everything it has killed recently and evaluating whether it's still doing more good than harm.

* ("Robot war dogs" is linkbait though, so I've taken that bit out of the title, as the site guidelines ask - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

The very positive thing is that you fearlessly addressed each point and provided more clarity. This is a positive reflection, because of your willingness to take the time to do such. Users usually don't know the other side, from the administrative point of view, so sometimes this can resolve misunderstandings.

I'm glad! Thanks for saying so.

It's true, a lot of this stuff doesn't explain itself and HN can be particularly cryptic. We try to make up for that by answering questions whenever people have them.

You're going to have to be more specific if you want a response. I really don't know what you're talking about. We're dealing with far too many users and posts to remember anything for very long.

I don't mind answering questions (if you have one?) but I need links. Also, links let any interested reader check what happened for themselves and make up their own mind. That's important, since the community is the jury here.

Edit: ah ok, you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34853852. I've answered there.

I explained this to you some time ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33445000): you were posting a plethora of unsubstantive Ask HNs that users were not only flagging but emailing us to complain about. That's a strong signal of community rejection, and after reviewing the posts as a moderator it was clear those users were correct.

Anyone who wants to check https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=unknownaccount with 'showdead' turned on in their profile can see this for themselves.

I don't know what you mean by "the Fischer link" but the way this works is that we take away submission privileges from an account when they've been submitting too many off-topic or bad (for HN) things, and that causes the software to kill future submissions. So of course there was a time lag between the time that we did this and the time you noticed it—there always is.

Btw, I didn't say "unsubstantiated" but "unsubstantive", meaning that the posts you were submitting didn't contain much information (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unsubstantive).