Show HN: Smothering Discussion of Cryptocurrency on HN
The HN post was climbing the front-page, and after I'd read the twitter thread I came back to upvote it. Right now I don't remember whether my upvote registered - my HN page was still open, and the post was still visible to me - but when I returned to the first page, it was mysteriously gone.
Only a couple minutes had passed, and I couldn't understand how a controversial Pinboard post had gone from climbing fast, to off the first page so quickly.
It wasn't on the second page, or the third page. I clicked on my browser history, but it seemed to be confused, as trying to return to the post simply got me back to the first page, and still no sign of it.[0]
So I decided to dupe the discussion - this is usually a sure-fire way to check whether a post has been deleted by the original poster, or if I would just get returned to the discussion I was duping.
To my surprise I was now the 'first' poster of this tweet on HN. So the original poster had deleted their post after all (I thought).
Within just a few short minutes my post had also disappeared - almost instantly flagged into oblivion while also climbing fast on the first page.
dang does a great job of moderation, but even he was misled into thinking there was an innocent explanation for the flagging:
"Edit: oh, the much simpler answer is that it was posted twice and both posts were on the front page. People flagged the dupe. That's fair."
The truth is, the two posts never got the chance to be on the first-page at the same time, because some people seem to be hellbent on censoring information on HN, and nearly succeeding.
This critical discussion of crypto was disappeared before it could become popular.
[0] I'm not sure whether having showdead set to 'yes' would have made any difference here?