Being downvoted is not being cancelled. If people don't agree with what you're saying, they're welcome to exercise their own right to speak and tell you so.
No, its visibility gets reduced. It's not invisible. You can see that it's there, it's slightly harder to read.
Flagging a comment can make it invisible, and even then, only if you haven't set your account to show dead comments. Flagging and down voting are different, and flagging a comment because you disagree with but is otherwise not breaking any rules it is considered inappropriate here, while down voting is not.
There's often a confusion between this. Disrespecting and disagreeing is not canceling.
downvote = disagree
flag = attempt to cancel
Which there are good reasons to flag: trolling, breaking rules, doxing, etc. Does flagging also get abused? Yes! The same is with "cancel culture." Do we boo people off stage that say stupid stuff? Yes. Do people try to prevent trolls from speaking at a school? Also yes, who needs someone intentionally antagonizing others? Do people abuse it? Yes. Do we also feature the abuse more than the good? Yes. In fact, your brain is also hard wired to remember those better too. But it is also important to remember that flagging is a form of speech too. You have the right to disagree. You have the right to say "this is inappropriate." But that doesn't mean you are right or that the person you are disagreeing with or flagging doesn't also have the right to say those things. I.E. you have the right to say racist and xenophobic things on Hacker News. Dang has the right to remove your comment too, because that is what we've agreed to here. If you disagree, well there are other communities with different rules. So you can work to get them changed here or go to a different community. (Please don't try to get racism allowed here)
> But it is also important to remember that flagging is a form of speech too.
Is a bullet a form of speech as well? Because flagging will essentially kill your account if done often enough, that's the same on every platform, that's why there's coordinated flagging. First you will get limited ("can only post once an hour"), then you'll get timed out ("can't post for a week"), then you get (shadow) banned: your posts are flagged by default, but you can't tell as long as you're logged in. All of this is pretty straight unless you have a hand protecting you in the form of moderators rejecting flags, but you don't want to rely on that, because political opinions of both you and the moderators might change - a modern state based on law is much more reliable than staying on the good side of the local war lord.
"But others can theoretically still read it if they set showdead=true, so you're not rally deplatformed" isn't a valid argument against it. You can theoretically generate your own electricity and get your water delivered by truck etc if the local utility companies decide that they don't want to do business with you because of arbitrary reasons. But we've pretty much all decided to ignore those "well, technically you can [but practically you can't]" and just force the utility companies to not discriminate.
But it's not you being canceled, it's the comment. The equivalent on HN would require a bunch of people getting mad at a comment you made a year ago, and then downvoting all your future comments so they get buried regardless of their content. While there's probably people who do that, it's not applicable to your average grey comment.
As another commentor said, once you have enough downvotes your comment disappears therefore my statement stands that it is technically cancelled. I think after 2 negative downvotes it should really be required to respond to a comment to downvote any further if they are in the negative.
Cancel culture is not about removing individual messages on a web forum, though. Someone who has lost their living, their home or their friends can start taking about being “cancelled”. Having ONE of your messages made harder to read is not “being cancelled”.
