I was looking forward to spending the day talking to people about cyber security but if my comments are going to disappear like that then maybe hacker news is not the site for me. A shame really.
Edit; I don't know for sure but this is possibly the last straw for me on hacker news. It really has gone downhill. If good faith discussions from experts are being secretly deleted for what I can only now assume are for nefarious reasons then I can't trust what I find here is in anyway representative. It's unfortunate in that there really isn't anywhere else to go. Now my best discussions are in small WhatsApp groups / Discords with friends. It's ok for me where I have had a career to get to know people personally and have such groups but if public forums are tainted in this way then younger people in this field will end up only talking to each other.
I appreciated your comment and saw it earlier before it was detached. Thank you for sharing it. It got decent visibility to readers, as your points suggest. I suggest you cut the mods some slack for adjusting things on one of the heaviest trafficked threads ever. The phenomena dang describes with only semi-related reply to the first thread does exist and I myself have gotten higher points on posts that benefit from it, unintentionally and intentionally (didn’t realize that was abuse, sorry dang). I think we are better off with an ecosystem that limits such point/visibility seeking or accidental behavior, even for good content. Don’t take it personally.
(I do think there should be some way to skim for, say top X% rated comments particularly on mega threads, somewhat like there was/is on slash dot with its point filtering. This would have helped visibility for a detached comment like yours, would reduce the ordering benefit dang mentions for those using it, and improve usability more generally for busier readers. But that’s my 2 cents. These things always cut multiple ways.)
A megathread is always a tough place to add value, on any platform. Who am I, but I appreciate you and your comments and hope you continue to share with a broader audience that includes me here.
I was tipple downvoted in ~20s before it disappeared so I noticed it very quickly because I keep an eye on pts to see if people have interreacted with something I've posted. I then scanned through the peer comments and noticed that a bunch of other comments had been very freshly flagged, within the ~40s of the last time I checked. These comments have been around for over an hour so the odds that there were all independently flagged so quickly at exactly the same time is highly improbable. And I couldn't see if my own comment had been flagged even though I could see others.
It's possibly a bug but I've seen similar behavior before and it was due to flagging but without the flagging flag appearing which happened later. I think it's a variation of hellbanned but for a single post. It was easy to notice because not only did the points go down just before disappearing they also stopped going up as it had done so reliably before being removed.
Edit; I don't know for sure but this is possibly the last straw for me on hacker news. It really has gone downhill. If good faith discussions from experts are being secretly deleted for what I can only now assume are for nefarious reasons then I can't trust what I find here is in anyway representative. It's unfortunate in that there really isn't anywhere else to go. Now my best discussions are in small WhatsApp groups / Discords with friends. It's ok for me where I have had a career to get to know people personally and have such groups but if public forums are tainted in this way then younger people in this field will end up only talking to each other.