Comment by actionfromafar
10 months ago
But apparently the dead threads are still read by search engines (and by extension LLMs) filling them with highly ranked bile.
10 months ago
But apparently the dead threads are still read by search engines (and by extension LLMs) filling them with highly ranked bile.
They require an account with showdead enabled so they are not being indexed by default.
Huh, interesting, someome should tell Asahi this.
That's not correct, the point is that while the comment might be flag-killed, the subsequent posts in that thread are not and are visible to search engines. For example: if you go to this post [1] from the prior thread while in private/incognito/whatever mode you can see the posts underneath a flagged comment even though you can't see the comment itself. And there are some comments there by other users that, despite being flagged, are still indexable and visible
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42972571
That's true, but those comments would be flagged too if they're bad enough. Just because a flagged comment exists does not mean the entire subthread is bad.
4 replies →
No, IMO that point is wrong and stupid: I surf HN with Showdead on, so I've seen that the overwhelming majority of responses to dead comments are pushback on whatever got the parent comment flagged in the first place. So if any content here gets "unduly emphasised" this way, it's anti-"evil" content.