I looked in the logs. That comment was never [dead] and then unkilled, so I'm not sure what you were seeing?
In any case, you posted this 5 minutes after the comment appeared. That's not enough time to conclude anything about HN, other than that trolls sometimes post here, like they do everywhere on the public internet. It takes time for the community systems (voting, flagging, and moderation) to take effect. It would be nice if we could make them work instantly, but we don't know how to do that. As you can see, the comment is now flag-killed. No single comment can say "a hell of a lot" about a site where 8000 comments appear daily, but since the community functioned as intended in the end, we can count this data point in its favor.
But there's a more important point. Since you're participating here, you're part of the state of the site, and we need you to help take care of it. In the present case that means flagging an egregious comment, instead of feeding it by replying, which only makes the site worse. This is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Had you contributed a flag, you would have helped take care of the problem sooner. Fortunately other users came along and did, thereby improving the state of the site. If you'd be willing to help out like that in the future, we'd appreciate it. But in any case, please don't feed the trolls on HN. The more you do, the more responsibility for the flamewar accrues to you, regardless of how right you are. This is ancient internet wisdom for good reason.
To flag a comment, click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top. There's a small karma threshold, currently 30, before flag links appear. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I had no idea that I could flag comments- I assumed that since there was no link to do so I couldn't, not realizing that I had to go to the comment page itself to do so.
Would it be possible to clean this UI up a bit? I bet I'm not the only user who didn't realize they could do this.
In any case, you posted this 5 minutes after the comment appeared. That's not enough time to conclude anything about HN, other than that trolls sometimes post here, like they do everywhere on the public internet. It takes time for the community systems (voting, flagging, and moderation) to take effect. It would be nice if we could make them work instantly, but we don't know how to do that. As you can see, the comment is now flag-killed. No single comment can say "a hell of a lot" about a site where 8000 comments appear daily, but since the community functioned as intended in the end, we can count this data point in its favor.
But there's a more important point. Since you're participating here, you're part of the state of the site, and we need you to help take care of it. In the present case that means flagging an egregious comment, instead of feeding it by replying, which only makes the site worse. This is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Had you contributed a flag, you would have helped take care of the problem sooner. Fortunately other users came along and did, thereby improving the state of the site. If you'd be willing to help out like that in the future, we'd appreciate it. But in any case, please don't feed the trolls on HN. The more you do, the more responsibility for the flamewar accrues to you, regardless of how right you are. This is ancient internet wisdom for good reason.
To flag a comment, click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top. There's a small karma threshold, currently 30, before flag links appear. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html