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.