[User8712]

Are comments ever deleted or hidden from view completely? I've been reading HN for a year or two, and I've never noticed an issue with comment quality. In topics with a larger number of comments, you get one or two heavily downvoted posts, but that's it.

My question, is there an issue with comments I'm not seeing? Do the popular topics on the homepage have dozens of spam or troll comments that are pruned out constantly, so I don't notice the problem? Or is the issue those 1 or 2 downvoted comments I mentioned earlier?

HN receives a small number of comments, so fine tuning algorithms isn't a big deal in my opinion. This isn't Reddit, where the number one post right now has 4,000 comments. That presents a lot of complications, since they need to try and cycle new comments so they all receive some visibility, allowing them a chance to rise if they're of high quality. On HN, you have 20 comments, or 50 comments, so regardless of the sorting, nearly everything gets read. As long as HN generally sorts comments, they're fine.

[dang]

There are two ways for comments to be hidden from view. One is "dead" and the other "deleted". Comments can end up "dead" for a variety of reasons (such as if the commenter is banned), but they're not really hidden—you can turn "show dead" on in your profile to make them appear.

"Deleted" comments are hidden, but much less common. If a comment is deleted it almost always means that the author removed it or (very rarely) asked us to remove it later for a compelling reason.

When we talk about toxic and other low-quality comments, though, we're only concerned about comments that are live on the page. So yes, you are seeing them. I'm glad they haven't been spoiling HN for you! Personally I think the fading out of negatively scored comments is one of the best design choices PG ever made for the site. I once told him that, and he expressed surprise and said he never sees it. (The admin version of the software doesn't do any fading.)

[amirmc]

> "Personally I think the fading out of negatively scored comments is one of the best design choices PG ever made for the site. I once told him that, and he expressed surprise and said he never sees it. (The admin version of the software doesn't do any fading.)"

I concur. It makes a big difference to how I read the site and react to comments, especially since comment scores are not visible. I'm kinda surprised that pg (as an admin) didn't experience this.