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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

When you see a dead comment that you feel shouldn't be, vouch for it. With a couple of vouches it'll become live again and can be responded to.

Usually when I see a perfectly good, but dead, comment I check out the user's history. I usually see one of two situations here:

1. It's clear that they have a pattern of making nasty, off-topic, often vulgar comments. I'll still vouch for their good comments, but at least I can understand why they were dead to begin with.

2. If their history is of mostly normal comments except one bad joke at the start of their posting history that got them hell banned, then I'll vouch for them and let them know what's happened.

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Thanks, that's actually a good point.

I knew there was an option to vouch for comments but just assumed I did not have enough Karma to do so. But another comment in this discussion mentioned the "hidden" flag button, which you only see if you click the comments timestamp.

And sure enough, the vouch button is just there. So the problem may just be that you have to know where to find it. Which I now do. And hopefully everyone who didn't and reads this now as well.

I probably should have mentioned that. Yeah, you have to click on posts (so the link isn't just visible in the normal discussion) in order to vouch or flag them. I think that that's a reasonable thing, it requires a moment's thought to do (even a brief one) so it can't be someone's reflex like downvoting.

I do appreciate that you can undo most of these actions now. There was a time when downvoting (and upvoting) were instantaneous and permanent. It was very frustrating when scrolling on my phone and accidentally downvoting someone because I used the wrong kind of press in the wrong place.

I suspect the intention was to create a small barrier to entry for the "heavier" features, to reduce petty usage. It only takes a little exploration to find (no offense, I didn't know about them for a while either).

In case 2 you should email hn@ycombinator.com. We watch for those ourselves and unban such users. Inevitably we don't see them all, though, and emails from fellow users are super helpful in that case.

Moderation is guesswork, and even if we guess 99% accurately about which accounts to ban in the early stage—a necessary thing to do, because otherwise the site would be overrun with spammers and trolls—that still leaves quite a few false positives who later turn out to be neither spammers nor trolls.

I'll try to remember that in the future. I don't see #2 very often, which is a positive of this site. Usually it seems to be newer accounts or infrequent posters which makes sense.

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