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Comment by surround | Hacker News Reader

Many are wondering why this was marked as dupe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028

Just speculation: maybe a dupe of a dead topic.

No, we'd only mark a story a [dupe] if it got significant attention in a different thread. I haven't heard back yet, but the most likely explanation is that a moderator (correctly) thought that one Tank Man story on the HN front page was enough.

Edit: oh - I think that one was actually marked a [dupe] by software. I'd need to double check this, but if so, it's because it interpreted the link to the other thread as a signal of dupiness.

Edit 2: yes, that's what happened. When a submission is heavily flagged and there is a single comment pointing to a different HN thread, the software interprets that as a strong signal of dupiness and puts dupe on the submission. It actually works super well most of the time. In this case it backfired because the comment was arguing the opposite.

So if someone wants to bury a story, now they know how to do it.

Serious question: does flagging it as dupe by software automatically remove it? Or does a mod need to click a button at this point?

He posted elsewhere that a mod has to approve it but they may glance at it without tons of focus

That's not quite accurate, but even if it were, there are easy ways to improve that bit of software if people start abusing it.

You're right that most such software tricks, especially anti-abuse measures, need to be secret in order to stay working.

> That's not quite accurate, but even if it were, there are easy ways to improve that bit of software if people start abusing it.

How easy it would be for bad actors brigading with freshly created accounts, or not-so-freshly created accounts with a history of brigading, to abuse this feature to censor stories?

I think I already answered this but I'll put it a different way: (1) not as easy as it sounds; (2) it would be easy to tell that they were doing it; (3) if they do it, we'll improve the software so they can't; (4) if that doesn't work, it's a minor feature and we can easily drop it.

Aha, there really WAS something funny going on.

Of course, do not attribute to conspiracy that which can be attributed to a bug! ;-)

It’s a bug and totally not a feature! ;)

^in hindsight, stupid comment.

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