You'd love to see that because you've witnessed such instances, or because you like scandals?
Also, moderation has become a lot more transparent over the last year or so (see https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang) and I cannot think of a site offhand that does a better job of this.
Edit: My comments about moderation are related to the parent statement about how Hacker News often indicates why thread contents (such as the title) have changed.
Most of those bans I've seen have been enough to make me cock an eyebrow, as well.
When you get banned from a subreddit you are told, by the system, via private message. Reddit has user-level shadowbanning as well, but I've only ever seen it used when it was warranted, like doxxing -- here, some of the hellbanned comment histories mystify me. Reddit certainly has its own share of weirdness but in my opinion, /r/askscience (to use one example) has absolutely incredible moderation that makes HN pale in comparison.
Great examples are Gödels beliefs of ghosts and paranormal activity; some older Nobel laureates turned to 'weird' (for the lack of a better word) ideas at some point in time; etc. Not cited in the article, Gödel also believed to have found a logical proof of the existence of God: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Kurt_G.C3.....
People got upset that religions got included it. I can understand the disagreement, but I can't understand the need to censor the discussion. Whether you believe it or not, it shouldn't be a stretch to concede that religion is weird, in some sense. It's completely outside our usual phenomena, and it's an arbitrary explanation for several questions, or maybe it's a relief. But it's as strange as it is interesting that so many people hold those beliefs.
The original discussion:
More than once I've been in a comment thread where conversation dried up, and it is because the story got flagged to page 2 and beyond. I won't list topics but the usual suspects are fairly obvious.
(I'm not complaining, but it's intriguing to me that this comment shot from +3 to 0 between refreshes.)
Of course, I could be wrong - I used to think that Slashdot wouldn't ban negative pieces on Sourceforge either.
You even repeated and agreed with the sole point I'm making.
That was a unique case in my memory. "Often rank a pro-YC comment to the top of a thread" is pure fabrication. As I've explained many times, we intervene less, not more, when stories are anti-YC, precisely because of the conflict of interest. It's literally the first thing PG emphasized to me when explaining how to moderate HN.
A recent example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622711. That class of outrage thread is something we routinely penalize, but we penalized this one less because it was about Airbnb. There's no way it would have stayed on the front page for hours otherwise.
I think strictly speaking that may be true, however I suspect the reason that that is is because of the precautions already taken by the HN software and HN operators, e.g. by rankbanning. When users who have voiced anti-YC sentiments are already rankbanned, for example, you don't even need to intervene, because those comments will already have sunk to the bottom. So I think you can probably successfully refute my individual points but the larger spirit of my assertion remains.
Newer comments are given a boost in rankings so they have a chance to get upvoted. That comment might have been upvoted enough to stay on the top afterward (I am not affiliated with YC or HN).