Ask HN: Why are many of this user's comments marked [dead]? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are many of this user's comments marked [dead]?

4 pointsnomilk7 comments

Randomly noticed this user [0] made a (fairly reasonable) comment [1] on a thread, and in less than 1 minute it was marked [dead]. I noticed a lot of their other comments suffered a similar fate.

Just wondering if there could be some sort of bot doing that?

I asked an LLM what could be happening and it suggests the user may be shadowbanned. But some of their other comments seem to get through.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bigbacaloa

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43749051

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As someone who has showdead turned on, I'm reasonably certain that users and websites can be shadowbanned. To know for certain you'd have to ask the user directly, or dang would have to weigh in.

thank you very much, just learned that there's a showdead option, i turned on it and go to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bigbacaloa and holy what an apocalyptic scene

I have showdead enabled and the comment you referenced as [1] is currently not showing as dead for me.

The comments that got through were likely vouched for by other users that have showdead enabled.

it's [dead] but not [flagged], so maybe it's the user deleted the comment by him/herself?

> Just wondering if there could be some sort of bot doing that?

My conclusion is no: some of my comments survived for a while, then were all flagged at the same time, so it seems like there’s a powerful user who checked my profile and decided to clean up unfriendly or low‑quality comments

> maybe it's the user deleted the comment by him/herself?

I think a comment immediately deleted by oneself will simply completely vanish rather than being marked [dead] or [flagged], although I'm not totally sure.

A comment that's been replied to and deleted by the user who wrote it will show as [deleted], not [dead] or [flagged]. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure they just disappear.

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