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

4 points by nomilk 8 months ago

9 comments

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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

nathanaldensr 8 months ago

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.

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andyjohnson0 8 months ago

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

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romanhn 8 months ago

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

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suraci 8 months ago

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

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  • nomilk 8 months ago

    > 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.

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    • toast0 8 months ago

      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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