Lots of identified issue with ranking for stories and comments with current Lemmy. That is one of them as well as the negative votes/comment count when an item is removed. Hoping that the 0.19.x branch of Lemmy will solve some of those things.
Does bring up other questions too though:
why is a removed comment/post still visible to standard users?
why do certain places still show the content of the removed item?
why aren't those removed items at the bottom of the list to begin with, if shown?
Etc. No answer for you specifically right now but Ill put it on 'the list' to track down and try to have a Beehaw solution for.
The nuclear: destruction of all traces of a post/comment is probably only useful in extreme cases like CSAM. Otherwise it’s useful for users to be able to evaluate mods to verify there are no shenanigans to establish trust. A user should be able to see the modlog and then see most removed content from a transparency PoV, one hopes.
And I think lack of transparency is an issue. I just raised an issue about that.
My friend, lack of transparency is not something that Beehaw has ever been accused of before. In terms of evaluating mods, neither mods or admins are on users payroll. There's not really a concept of users evaluating mods or mod decisions for Beehaw. However, you may be interested in the modlog which is public.
Can you explain a bit more about how or what is causing this lack of transparency?