The site admins have posted before asking that anyone who thinks they see botting or other malicious behaviors to please email them using the Contact link in the footer.

If you haven’t done so and you’d like your concern to be reviewed by the site admins, I encourage you to do so; they haven’t replied here by now, which means they won’t see this unless you do email them.

Thank you! I did contact dang, and everything is fine :) No evil botnets are involved!

Up and downvoting on HN works in mysterious ways. I don't think there are botnets voting. If there are, they are spending their time upvoting content. My theory is that HN has an "anger management" feature. That is, if a user is posting comments that others down vote, the system assumes that the user is "angry" and automatically penalizes their subsequent comments. Feel free to down vote and flag this comment so that I can test my theory.

25 minutes later, the comment no longer shows as "dead", it's just a normal comment. Maybe people upvoted it? But how? I thought dead comments have no upvote button?

Or maybe there are no botnets, and I simply don't understand the mechanics of "dead" in HN. Like maybe some users get automatic "dead" status to their comments due to past violations? (That would be a bit strange though.)

> Like maybe some users get automatic "dead" status to their comments due to past violations?

That what happens: HN doesn't fully ban people, but instead just hides their comments by default. (e.g. what happens if you see dang comment "we've banned this user")

So this automatic hiding by HN are indistinguishable to the regular users from the "dead" comments caused by downvoting? And the regular users can revive such automatically "hidden" comments in exactly the same way as they can revive comments downvoted to death?

About "we've banned this user": do you mean some comments will be replaced by this message, but others (future?) comments will be automatically assigned dead status but still visible?

The way it seems to work:

(I'm going to keep this simple by sticking to racist/bigoted posts, as those seem to be the ones this happens to the most)

X posts something bigoted. Whatever it is, it gets downvoted and flagged and ends up dead. These will turn into hidden posts that are tagged [dead]. If X repeats this behavior or is otherwise a bad actor (within the context of the HN guidelines) they may end up shadowbanned. Shadowbanned users' comments start off [dead] by default, even their valid ones. It's up to others (like me, with showdead on) to vouch for these better comments.

Some users may take it too far. The comments aren't just bigoted, but outright espousing something most of us reject (a user I saw this happen to recently posted a comment basically calling for mass killing of an entire ethnic group). Users that take things too far like that, or who are otherwise abusing the HN system, end up [banned]. Their comments cannot be revived, though you can still see them if you turn on showdead.

Now, that's an extreme. I'm not sure all the reasons someone could end up [banned], but the primary one is repeatedly ignoring the HN guidelines and abusive behavior towards other posters. dang seems to be good, as well, of warning people if their behavior is outside the bounds.

Great! I'm glad no evil botnets are involved :) And thanks for the explanation!

On top of what jtsummerssaid, users with enough karma can 'vouch' for dead comments and get them revived. I've no idea what the threshold is, but I can vouch for those comments if I wanted, you've got to click through to the direct comment page to do it (click the time of the comment, it's a link).

I suspect another user has done exactly that for the comment that was suddenly visible, someone vouched for it.

On the other hand, I wouldn't say that users comments are great, bit conspiracy sounding, insults another user, I wouldn't vouch for him.

That makes sense. I guess shadow banning may also expire over time?

You can click the timestamp of a dead comment and vouch for it. You may also have to enable showdead, not sure.

You can enable a "showdead" option which would show dead comments and allow you to upvote them.

Thanks! That at least explains how the comment became undead.

Likely killed by a spam filter. See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638699

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10473918

Did you email dang and ask? Both of the moderators have been very open and responsive to questions when I have emailed them.

  hn@ycombinator.com

Yes, dang is super nice, he responded to my message and confirmed that everything is working as intended!

New accounts can start shadowbaned (algorithms), this account is 1 day old.

Then people can vouch on dead comments.