Ask HN: Why do threads die?

3 pointsdbz4 comments

I'm wondering if anyone has an answer to my question. An example is currently on the news page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1179711

I understand there are banned links, so those pages are automatically killed. However, I see this thread was killed without any reason- except for the author wrote the title and text without being very....proper?

Maybe we can start giving reasons (possibly) for closing threads?

View on HN

I imagine it was flagged multiple times, and tipped over the flag/vote weight. I'm personally in favour of this system on HN - it may be biased towards threads dying, but I would rather kill some good threads than have a bias that allows off-topic, link-bait etc rising to the top.

Of course, I have Show Dead on, so in effect dead threads are just an extra datapoint when I decide whether to read.

Yes, that one was flagged to death.

Maybe there should be an unflag option?

There is. After you flag something, the link that used to say "flag" changes to "unflag".

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