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Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

Evolution frequently does get stuck in a local optimum.

This is why some animals have barely changed in appearance for hundreds of millions of years, e.g. scorpions, while others have changed so much that nobody would guess the relationship between them and their ancestors, had we not discovered some intermediate steps in their evolution.

More recently, e.g. 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs still lived, the ancestor of humans looked more like a rat than like a human, but the ancestors of sharks, crocodiles and big constrictor snakes looked pretty much the same like today.

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I posted a reply doubting the existence of dinosaurs (50073836). When I looked after about one hour, it was dead. Maybe it was killed immediately, like another similar one I had posted in August, possibly killed by a moderator (49312918).

Now I'm wondering whether HN uses some sort of language model to infer semantic similarity and thus kill content automatically. Frankly, whether this is automatic or by consensus of certain users, there's not much of a difference. It is dystopian, especially given the mountains of meaningless one-line comments that abound here (probably “too little substance to be worth killing”).

Once upon a time the Internet was the realm of free thought and free speech. I get it that spam etc needs to be fought and suppressed, but frankly, none of my comments that have been killed (quite a couple of them already) come close to that category. Rather, it seems the ruling HN mindset is about as narrow-minded (if not more so in certain respects) than your typical mainstream forum.

It's probably user flags. I flag trollish comments.

In this case I think it was automatic, due to the inclusion of a link to Canadian Research Casting International company's website, which I first posted in 49312918, which at one point was suddenly dead.

Don't know about you specifically, but people here clearly "flag" things they disagree with, which is part of why what could be an interesting discussion often ends up being a dull CJ style chorus between affirmative and know-it-all. As if there was no middle ground between that and a "flamewar".

I've read comments to the effect it would be easy to change to the better by administrative means, but apparently there's no will, so "smug-flagging" seems to be in line with the purpose of the site, and that's it.

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