For what its worth, I was also shocked to see your entire comment thread, with over 110 children I believe, deleted from the thread without mention. Before this, I thought HN handled deletion with graying out, [flagged] or [dead] etc.
I only found it again by checking @dang's profile.
I've also emailed HN support strongly objecting to this complete deletion.
I didn't delete it; I downweighted it. You're running into the pagination problem (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23184485), which is that you've confused the first page of comments with the entire thread. Click More at the bottom and you'll find it perfectly intact, just lower.
We don't delete things outright on HN unless the author asks us to. The most we ever do is 'kill' a post, meaning it's still visible to anyone with 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile, and even that's rare. Beyond that, we'd never kill an entire subthread with dozens of replies. We might downweight it or we might auto-collapse it. That's all. By the way, if I had actually deleted that thread, you'd not have been able to find it via my profile. I'm not sure whether to be more hurt by your assuming I'm such an evil censor or such a bad programmer. (<-- that is an attempt at a joke)
Thank you for clarifying - you can disregard my email! I don't think I've ever seen/clicked the More on comments and was unaware of that feature. I appreciate you taking the time to explain!
You're welcome! I understand the shock of it seeming like something has completely disappeared, which is one reason I want to get rid of that pagination, as soon as our software can handle that load.
I only found it again by checking @dang's profile.
I've also emailed HN support strongly objecting to this complete deletion.