Due to all the complaints about thought-police, diary police, censorship, and the like, I went ahead and checked the "hidden comments" for today.
I refuse to use names, for obvious reasons.
That is, comments that were rated low enough by enough people to drop off screen. Comments that were part of a thread (responses to such low-ranking posts) aren't counted.
As of the time I loaded the "hidden comment" page, approximately 29 comments had been low-ranked enough to be pulled.
Of these 29 comments, 20 of them were by the same individual, all of them posted within a 2 1/2 hour timespan on a handful of threads. As best I can tell, that represents every comment that poster has ever made under that nick.
Of the remaining 9:
One individual had 3, occuring within a 7 minute time-span. Those three comments represent that poster's entire comment history on Daily Kos.
One had two, within a 6 minute time span. That poster has a long history of posting on Kos, and has posted 19 other comments today, none of which were low-ranked enough to be pulled.
The remaining four came from four seperate individuals. One of them is an irregular poster, and (with the exception of the pulled post) hasn't made a comment in over a month.
Another has a light posting history, with a mix of high and low grades.
The third and fourth post more regularly, and gets a great many "marginal" ratings.
It appears, in my opinion, that the system is working. The vast bulk of the filtered comments were by a single user, in a small time-span, with no prior posting history.
While some choices and decisions might indeed be based on groupthink and "censorship", it appears that the bulk of the damage is self-inflicted: 23 of the 29 hidden comments for today came from 2 users, neither of whom had a previous posting history, and both of whom had the dubious honor of having everything they said be low ranked by multiple people.
Not to say that the system doesn't need work, or that people should be more objective about it. But I'd say that the "though police" are focused mainly on the drive-by trolls.