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Comment by unknownaccount | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a bot that automatically archived [flagged] posts. the fact users here can use botnets to flag/remove any submission or post they dislike makes Hacker News positively useless for whistleblowing. I learned from experience anything even tangentially controversial is almost guaranteed to be false-flagged and taken down.

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I've often thought I should make a reddit bot that posts all the r/askhistorians comments to r/dontaskhistorians so I could see all the comments that are removed. I've chanced a few comments myself and the mods would rather have no information than some information (no matter how well referenced) that isn't entirely academically rigorous; their choice, it's not awful. I think that a lot of proverbial babies get thrown out with the bath water and a lot of interesting comments probably get removed.

Someone said "nothing was known about X until $date" or words to that effect and I replied with two sources, available online, that spoke about X prior to the date and that it was from my own recollection that I knew the sources existed. The incorrect comment stands and I got the usual "your comment was not complete enough for us". Every now and again I'll post something, especially when there are no responses and I have a source to share -- but I've taken to messaging the OP now instead.

Maybe it's all chaff, but I'm curious to find out.

I like the Slashdot way of having scoring and a slider so you can see it all if you want, and the "boosts" they do so you can see humorous stuff even if others want to see serious stuff. User-level filtering makes much more sense to me.

Can't you get flagged/dead posts on the new listing or firebase if you really wanted?

You can get metadata in order to preserve the comment tree, but it won't show the text for quality control reasons.

You can see dead/flagged comments via a setting, perhaps only exposed to users if their own score is high enough(?).

I've thought about making a site that publicly indexes and exposes all flagged and dead HN comments and stories.

Occasionally there are gems.

hnflagflyer.com

You should be able to turn on the "showdead" option in your user settings to see the text. But (like the other user) I'm not sure if there's a minimum karma amount for that toggle to show up.

I was referring to the API.

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