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Comment by chordalkeyboard | Hacker News Reader

> Comments can be deleted by any moderator with for any reason. They don't like you? They can delete all your comments. They hate LGBT people and believe you're LGBT? They can delete your comments. This is one reason why there is no visible comment history.

That site is a dumpster fire.

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Doesn't the site advise you when you comment that comments were supposed to be for asking clarification or suggesting edits, Not for giving answers? People often use them to give half-hearted answers and I've had that urge too but written a formal half-hearted answer instead. It wouldn't get upvoted or accepted but if you feel you've got something helpful to say, why not say it as an answer?

I think people are afraid to put their half-hearted answers as formal answers because they can get downvoted for being incomplete. But if you don't care about points like Gregg (and myself), then it doesn't matter.

Comments like his "this site might be helpful" are annoying. You have no idea if the writer even understood your question and whether spending time digging through that site will actually help or not. They shouldn't post that. You can google for general information/tutorial sites.

I think I'd rather have a comment "this site might be helpful" on the page than not. It doesn't take long to classify a link as either potentially helpful or useless, and I'm usually finding the SO page through a google search anyway. That may indicate I don't know the right query or jargon for what I want. In any case, I'd rather that SO err on the side of redundancy.

The core of the problem there is that for Gregg, "this site might be helpful" is an understatement; he knows there is a good chance that it will be helpful, that there is direct relevance...

...and then there are the legions of folks who've been posting links to the first Google result with that same text for years. Those are over-selling it: sure, the link might be helpful, buuuut... Probably not. These have been the bane of many a forum, clogging up the first page or so of responses, sometimes discouraging folks with actual knowledge of the topic from even bothering to respond.

There needs to be some way of distinguishing between the two.

Maybe we're supposed to consider how many reputation points the person has to judge the likely quality of their link. Those kinds of decisions are already built into StackOverflow with rules on who can write comments/etc. Maybe they just need tweaking so that posting a URL in a comment requires even higher reputation. If you don't have that reputation, you can do the harder work of writing an actual answer that includes the link.

My favourite SO moment was when my comment had been edited to mean exactly the inverse of what I had stated. Whoever moderated it had assumed that I must have made a mistake and did not understand the problem space from the same depth I did.

It happened to me more than once on stats.stackexchange.com. There is one (ex) moderator who is very demeaning and from time to time delete mine and his comments to change the narrative of the discussion.

This behavior makes me think twice before using that SE site.

This is something you should report to SE (the company) via the contact form with some specific questions where it happened. This would be grounds for a stern conversation/warning at least, and possible mod removal depending on the severity/frequency.

I thought about posting a meta thread, but I forgot to take screenshot of the those comments(which I intend to do next time) so I had no evidence since the mod already cleaned up the thread.

Do they have track records of deleted comments? Based on other comments on this thread it appears SE do not track deleted comments.

Mods can see (and undelete) all deleted comments. There is no way to "permadelete" comments, or if there is, it's only available to SE employees. I think you can also see when a comment was deleted, but not 100% sure as I'm no longer a mod myself and can't check.

Perfect! In that case I'll report to SE via the contact form. Thank you! It has been a while but the event still bothers me.

The function that SO serves should be owned by a non-profit. Everyone that posts to SO is working for free.

It is not just the moderators, comments can be abused by users as well. Once I had a top 25 user came to leave a wrong comment to my answer, in a rather aggressive tone. When called out, he just proceeded to delete the comment.

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