I'd appreciate a response to my prior appeal. The only change I'm noticing is that you collapsed your own comment and my reply. The optics of how this has been handled seem a bit questionable to me.
I reduced the downweight when you fixed the main problem with your comment. I didn't remove it altogether, though, because "Jews had a much easier time than Asians" is racial flamebait. I don't think you meant it that way, but it takes a rather close reading of your comment to arrive at that conclusion, and many readers, alas, aren't going to do that. It's our job to moderate flamebait on HN because otherwise flamewars take over everything.
I collapsed this subthread about allcaps in your comment because once you fixed the issue, the subthread was no longer relevant.
Optics are often going to be questionable here because the quantity of moderation actions we have to do vastly exceeds our ability to explain them all in detail, let alone answer all the additional questions and objections that such explanations invariably stir up. That constraint is a fundamental fact of the job.
On the other hand, there's no specific question you can't get an answer to. You should email hn@ycombinator.com, though, because if you ask your question in comments here, the odds are pretty high that we won't see it. Also, the guidelines ask you not to: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
There's no point. @dang's intervention had what may have been the intended effect (suppressing the comment). He's been doing this long enough to know precisely how the various moderation knobs he turns will distort the conversation.
The original comment had 24 upvotes and was solidly at the top of the comment page. Given its popularity, it likely would have stayed there. Mea culpa for exceeding the bounds of the Overton Window.
