I mean, this was kind of an exception case, where there is a big old technical war of words back and forth. Almost a "He said She said" except here, He is an absolute expert, and She is just some marketing dorks at Mongo.

I, for one, welcome this by-hand moderation because it keeps this issue alive, and allows Kyle to keep the discussion going.

As I commented in a previous post, Kyle is the Chef Ramsey of database testing, and here, he's in a position where some idiot has just served him an undercooked hamburger. Bits will fly, marketing people will be flayed alive, and Kyle will be the only one left standing at the end.

Without this by-hand moderation, we'd be missing out on the second act of this intense thriller!

Oh yes. HN has always been a moderated/curated/whatever-term-you-prefer site. Many past explanations can be found through these links:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23294048 to prevent the top comment from being too distracting.)

They use a combination of algorithms and human intervention, to generally good effect.

No clue if this "downweighting" in this case is an algorithm or a manual thing. I would assume algorithm for the downweighting and human intervention for reversing it, but that's sort of a guess or inference.

of course they do? given the quality of discussion here it's a hard requirement to preserve high snr.