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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

It's worth having "showdead" set to "yes" on your HN options page for this very reason. It's still "on the front page" for me, despite being dead :-) You get to see some rather.. interesting things stick around with this option on (and surprisingly little trash, unless you hang around /newest a lot).

That aside, there seems to be a lot of assumption that the post was deleted. This may not be so. Enough "flag"s can do it too, of course, but I get the impression that there are super users who can dead a post in one strike :-)

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Didn't know about this flag - thanks for pointing it out. As for the post - doesn't seem offensive at all.

PG: Hacker News improvement suggestion: for any post that gets deleted - show the username of the one who deleted it so when "showdead" is set to "yes" it shows this. An explanation would also be a nice thing to have as part of this mechanism. I'm going on the assumption that you follow Guido's BDFL model.

> show the username of the one who deleted

I have no evidence for this but I think there is a policy of the mods not discussing a) that they are mods and b) their reasoning etc.

I kinda agree; many forums end up degrading into arguments about which mod did what and for why.

EDIT: possible happy medium - a text field where a mod can jot down why it was killed...

Maybe an irrelevant data point, but I am in the top 10 users karma-wise, and I have never heard anything about being a mod. So it must be the super-secret elite that get to be mods.

Well - if we take a big leap here and assume that one of WakeMate's founders is a mod and this person deleted the post then the policy is not so good.

A possible approach is to allow the mods to have aliases to their usernames (and PG and company can be the only ones knowing the correspondence of alias to username). This way - HN users could see the history of deletions of a particular mod without knowing the actual user.

Granted, HN users are smart and someone could probably create a data mining app which would find the actual user by looking at pattern of deletions, topics of posts, etc... but that's life and that's what you get for having a lovely place such as HN.

The post was well over 10 votes (which IIRC is the limit where flags don't take effect in killing it any more).

So it was a moderator kill. On that score I believe YC alumni are the mods :)

Suggestion: repost with a request to not flag the article without an explanation why.

Why, so we can have more drama?

No, because if it is flags they might not flag it again. Deleting the story does more damage than a conversation.

The right answer to a flagged story isn't to repost it as an appeal. While I flagrantly ignore Graham's request to "just flag stories and not comment on them" (because I think that's a silly policy), even I might think it crosses a line to repost a story to beg for someone to violate that guideline.

The discussion the original story hoped for is already happening here. Let it do what it's going to do and then go away.

> The discussion the original story hoped for is already happening here.

Good point, I missed how fast this shot up.

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