The most concerning growing trend I see is comments that don't violate any guidelines, but are flagged to dead.
I'm not talking about posters that are shadowbanned, but about comments that engaged thoughtfully on a topic but the rest of the thread disagreed emphatically with.
I also don't even mean controversial takes on hot-button issues like vaccines.
Just plain old bucking the trend in a thread about AI, transit, housing, layoffs, etc.
I've been browsing with showdead on for as long as I can remember, and I'm seeing this accelerate. Comments from folks both you and I respect as high quality contributors here.
I don't know what the solution is, but it discourages me (and I'm sure others) from having the kind of thought-provoking dialog I've gotten used to reading here for the last 15 years.
Vouch them and/or email to hn@ycombinator.com and say why you think they deserve to be [undead].
I see that a lot, some have been erroneously caught by the real time AI detect filter (which actually isn't too bad at slicing out the actual AI gen comments) others have gone hard against the zeitgeist.
I've had the mods reinstate comments that I've thoroughly disagreed with but were making their best case for an opposing view - the threads are better with the best arguments forward for all sides of the elephant.
I don't know if the vouch threshold has increased or if the mods have removed my ability to vouch for other comments entirely.
Wondering if it was my good faith attempt to inform a user of their comments being auto-flagged [1] before I had any context that they were supposed to be persona non grata.
I can still vouch submissions though