Item — HN Reader

Try to post some grammatically incoherent comment and include the words "penis", "enlargement", and "pills". Let us know how it went.

This is probably just an anti-spam measure. There are many anti-china bots out there, so posting off-topic bot-like comments will get you removed.

What happened to Occam's razor?

3 comments

I think the Cynic's razor is used more often on HN. Always attribute everything to malice. Simple as that. Best part is that you will look so clever doing it. So much cleverer than the naive-looking commenters who try pointing out reasonable explanations.

Remember - be cynical, be confident, farm that karma.

I LOLed, because your comment itself is clearly a result of Cynic's razor.

As a matter of fact, the "communist bandits" issue is very probably not malice, but is likely an example of very dangerous negligence.

It was a comment on my own video, and this is after I saw a clip from a friend doing the same thing to one of his videos - random words that would be picked up be a naive regex.

It would help if you'd share the exact comments that got removed.

I mentioned then in another comment here. It was: Chinese trash wuhan tiananmen square

The comment below was that "Chinese trash" could have been blocked for "anti-harassment", but for a year old, low-viewed volume video giving a synthesizer demo, I'm not sure how Google could have interpreted it as harassment vs a comment on sanitation and recycling.

I don't think the video and its popularity matter, your comment looks like spam. It's entirely possible for Google to censor comments critical of China, but this is not evidence of it.

I posted the following, and it too was deleted:

The world's sanitisation problem could be helped with more recycling of chinese trash, especially in wuhan. The green waste that's turned into compost in tiananmen square is a bonus to sustainability.

Now that's more problematic. You could test this further by replacing those phrases with references to a different country, though it's possible that your account will receive more scrutiny from moderation bots due to your recently deleted comments.

It would be interesting to test trigger phrases on a larger scale from different accounts and publish your findings.

Did you try posting an actual comment which referenced those terms in a meaningful way? Maybe it’s being blocked for being spammy incoherent word salad.

No. I was in shock and then made this Ask HN post in disbelief, wanting to see if others had experienced the same thing.

Why not just try it now? It seems you spent far more time posting and maintaining the accusation than you did actually verifying if it was true.

See my edit of the description of the post. Yep, a meaningful comment that could now way be seen as an insult or harassment was deleted too.

What ever happened to holding people and organizations responsible for the stuff they do/make?