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dang • today at 7:42 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

That's not a thing. What triggers moderation and/or banning is when accounts break the site guidelines by going into political/nationalistic/ideological flamewar, as they unfortunately often do on divisive topics.

I assume you're asking about Israel. HN Search shows about 170k comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... All of those are live. That's a far cry from "automatic cancellation".

If you meant some other country, it's easy enough to check this about any of them.


Replies

mindslight • today at 7:51 PM

I think the problem is better stated as a large flagging contingent, rather than anything intrinsic to the site's code or official moderation. And the real problem is that it has an outsized chilling effect on substantive comments, which require putting in actual effort just to possibly be killed. From what I've observed comments/stories get a penalty from flags (before they actually end up [dead]) and this seems to be the actual objective - to stymie concrete discussion while a topic is popular.

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