Edit; it appears my comment has been moved to a top level comment, i.e. peer with the parent without any way of telling what happened - so now there is the whole other pointless branch polluting the relevance of the tree.
Previously;
It appears that someone was able to take my previous comment in this thread completely off hacker news, it's not even listed as flagged. It was at 40pts before disappearing, perhaps there is some reputation management going on here. If it was against the site rules it would be helpful to know which ones.
Edit; the link is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007985 it was a high up comment that no longer appears even though flagged comments do appear. I checked if it has been moved but the parent comment is still the same. This feels like hellbanned in that there isn't an easy way for me to see if I've been shadowbanned. But I really don't know. I was commenting in good faith.
It's a vital moderation function to do this, particularly when the parent is the top comment of the entire thread. Those tend to attract non-reply-replies, and that has bad effects on the thread as a whole. It causes the top part of the page to fill up with generic rather than specific content, and it makes the top subthread too top-heavy.
I'm not saying that you did anything wrong or that your post was bad or that it was unrelated to the original parent. The problem is that the effects I'm describing pile up unintentionally and end up being a systemic problem. It isn't anybody's fault, but there does need to be someone whose job it is to watch out for the system as a whole, and that's basically what moderators do.
Sometimes we comment that we detached a post from its original parent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and sometimes not. (Perhaps the software should display this information automatically.) I'm less likely to do it when a comment stands on its own just fine, which was the case with your post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007985 and which is usually the case with the more generic sort of reply—in fact it's one test for deciding that question.
> so now there is the whole other pointless branch polluting the relevance of the tree
Yes, please don't do that—especially in the top subthread. I understand the frustration of "WTF where did my comment go", but you can always reach us at hn@ycombinator.com and get an answer.
Oh, nevermind, it's just a third-party cybersecurity tool running on the server detected a potential threat and quarantined the offending database record, just in case!
I was looking forward to spending the day talking to people about cyber security but if my comments are going to disappear like that then maybe hacker news is not the site for me. A shame really.
Edit; I don't know for sure but this is possibly the last straw for me on hacker news. It really has gone downhill. If good faith discussions from experts are being secretly deleted for what I can only now assume are for nefarious reasons then I can't trust what I find here is in anyway representative. It's unfortunate in that there really isn't anywhere else to go. Now my best discussions are in small WhatsApp groups / Discords with friends. It's ok for me where I have had a career to get to know people personally and have such groups but if public forums are tainted in this way then younger people in this field will end up only talking to each other.
I appreciated your comment and saw it earlier before it was detached. Thank you for sharing it. It got decent visibility to readers, as your points suggest. I suggest you cut the mods some slack for adjusting things on one of the heaviest trafficked threads ever. The phenomena dang describes with only semi-related reply to the first thread does exist and I myself have gotten higher points on posts that benefit from it, unintentionally and intentionally (didn’t realize that was abuse, sorry dang). I think we are better off with an ecosystem that limits such point/visibility seeking or accidental behavior, even for good content. Don’t take it personally.
(I do think there should be some way to skim for, say top X% rated comments particularly on mega threads, somewhat like there was/is on slash dot with its point filtering. This would have helped visibility for a detached comment like yours, would reduce the ordering benefit dang mentions for those using it, and improve usability more generally for busier readers. But that’s my 2 cents. These things always cut multiple ways.)
A megathread is always a tough place to add value, on any platform. Who am I, but I appreciate you and your comments and hope you continue to share with a broader audience that includes me here.
I was tipple downvoted in ~20s before it disappeared so I noticed it very quickly because I keep an eye on pts to see if people have interreacted with something I've posted. I then scanned through the peer comments and noticed that a bunch of other comments had been very freshly flagged, within the ~40s of the last time I checked. These comments have been around for over an hour so the odds that there were all independently flagged so quickly at exactly the same time is highly improbable. And I couldn't see if my own comment had been flagged even though I could see others.
It's possibly a bug but I've seen similar behavior before and it was due to flagging but without the flagging flag appearing which happened later. I think it's a variation of hellbanned but for a single post. It was easy to notice because not only did the points go down just before disappearing they also stopped going up as it had done so reliably before being removed.
I still keep the points, so perhaps a loss of possible future points. The points don't bother me, I restart antonymous accounts on occasion. I kind of use points to get an idea of where other peoples opinions which is half the reason I use this site. A negative signal to something I think is good is actually more interesting than a positive signal. I'm more worried about the damage such actions do to the 'market place of ideas' and if it hasn't pushed me away then perhaps it has pushed others that I'm interested to hear from. And if so where have they gone. Once I become disinterested in the opinions of others on this site then it's unlikely I'll have any further use for hacker news - and I'm getting pretty close to that point.
I edited my post to include the link, I guess if people see these posts I'm not completely banned and maybe there isn't anything nefarious going on, they have a situation where the comments to a single comment are already off the first page so there could be a software bug. But it does appear that there is some sort of reputation management going on.
Ah thanks, I guess it's been moved to it's own top level comment - I did check but only checked until page 4. It's weird because this chain of comments which is otherwise off topic and doesn't have anywhere near the points (2 (edit now 0) vs 37) and has same parent is on the first page. So I'm not sure if that was the right remedy. Hackernews needs better tooling for this or at least let me know if something has moved to try to flatten out the tree.
Previously;
It appears that someone was able to take my previous comment in this thread completely off hacker news, it's not even listed as flagged. It was at 40pts before disappearing, perhaps there is some reputation management going on here. If it was against the site rules it would be helpful to know which ones.
Edit; the link is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007985 it was a high up comment that no longer appears even though flagged comments do appear. I checked if it has been moved but the parent comment is still the same. This feels like hellbanned in that there isn't an easy way for me to see if I've been shadowbanned. But I really don't know. I was commenting in good faith.