I vouched for (undeaded) your comment, since I think the flagging/downvoting runs contrary to the principles of discourse we're (at least implicitly) celebrating here, smelling of tribalism/favoritism. Just because you view someone favorably, and someone else claims something negative about that person, doesn't mean you just get to flagbomb them into oblivion.
The right response here is simply to ask for further substantiation, as danso did. It's not clear to me that the mods are directly responsible for what you've experienced. If you haven't, I would contact them for clarification.
Downvoting something for complaining about votes is fairly normal. Downvote baiting on top is flagworthy. I imagine lots of people quite sensibly apply these as a matter of course.
With some exceptions I downvote any comment that complains about downvotes. I'm not 100% comfortable about it, and I might change my approach, but so far rigorously applying the rules seems to be working. I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one to do so.
Suppose he is being treated unfairly by the mods. Is that not worth complaining about?
I don't give a crap about some silly "downvote every comment complaining about downvotes" rule. Complaining about downvotes was frowned upon because people get inexplicably downvoted as a matter of course here, and the frequency of complaints was deemed sufficiently detracting to warrant being frowned upon. Being treated unfairly by the mods, however, is another matter entirely.
I haven't seen a preponderance of evidence suggesting the complaint was ill-founded, and the guy's tenure and comment history (what I looked through of it) do not suggest he's an ill-mannered troll, so I reserve judgement as to whether the complaint is in the wrong. Like any reasonable person would.
I didn't downvote but I think others might have because you leveled an allegation so vague as to be irrefutable. I think dang has been a great mod and have only seen the interactions that involve me, or have been upvoted. Doesn't mean I wouldn't be interested in seeing substantive criticism from those who've experienced differently.
If there were a search engine that, say, turned up comment-pairs where dang replied to chris_wot, then it would be easy to get a sampling of their (public) interactions. I doubt any normal search engines (or even hn.algolia.com) do it. (And both posters are active enough that going through history is impractical. BTW, as one data point, 14 of dang's last 36 comments contain the word "please".) Perhaps someone has a database of HN comments that could be queried in such a way. But yeah, in the absence of links or a pointer to such a database, it's not substantiated and so the reader's evaluation is going to depend primarily on their prior opinions.
It wouldn't cover situations where the mods took action or retaliated without publicly commenting. But to your question about a queryable database, such a thing exists on BigQuery: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17471117
It’s kind of hard to do. Almost certainly dang or another mod would rate limit or shadow ban me.
It’s their site to do as they will, but it strikes me as interesting that they are held up as saints when they are anything but. Note that I’m not saying they are monsters either, but as someone on the receiving end of dang’s conduct I personally cannot agree with this post. It’s not like they are really accountable for their actions.
