Discussed earlier. It seems this is an opinion hit piece that is may be inappropriately abusing the upvote system.
I've known this was going on for a long time, and know of a number of influencers of various kinds that I'm certain are enemy action. This stuff has been happening and is still happening. This is relevant.
But it is important and it is time we stopped pretending it isn't.
Anonymous entities paying to spread disinformation or even unnecessary confusion about vaccines should be viewed first and foremost as attempting to keep vaccination rates lower in the places where this is happening.
And then one should ask "who would want to do this? why?". And one likely won't be far wrong if one assumes the worst.
Twisting facts is a neat trick, but ensuring people never read anything else is the real magic here imo
Hence this story. This is what goes on.
Cries of 'censorship! Stop censoring my right to this pro-disease opinion!' combined with more furtive but heavyhanded censoring of shall we say alternate motivations for the 'censored' opinions that must be, yea must be heard in the free marketplace of ideas.
It's not magic. It's dead simple on Reddit and places like that: brigade things with downvotes. On twitter, some voices get such a height of harassment that it's pretty much impossible to continue. Apparently on Hacker News, content gets watched very closely so it can be stifled at birth in natural-looking ways, since raw brigading would likely be too obvious.
EDIT: did people seriously start the shouting because it got a single-digit number of upvotes in the first minutes? ...
And this is the only way to do it: flag positive interest, and flag anybody saying anything you don't want said. And then accuse them of being a bot army or something. Bot armies don't work on Hacker News, but false flagging does. My assumption is that the threshold for taking action is low enough to be reached by an innocent-looking number of brigaded complaints.
This very article from the BBC and its multiple, stifled attempts to show up at all on Hacker News is evidence of this tactic being employed. The conversation around it's lively enough to demonstrate enough seed interest in article discussion, but just try and engage in such discussion.
Somebody is stifling this topic through attempts to use the rules of Hacker News against it.
Or, 'it's Tuesday'. In other words this is completely normal and to be expected given the conditions the article itself reports on. We're stuck going 'meta' even to talk about the article at all, because the management of such talk is coordinated, effective, and extensive.
I think it is this plus I believe hacker news penalizes 'controversial' discussions, so by ensuring that there are a large number of 'controversial' comments the trolls can kill off discussions they want suppressed.
I think in many places it'd be possible to get a whole righteous indignation going that could be exploited against itself, but this is Hacker News. We are nerds and super-interested in exactly this sort of thing, to the point that there are rules against obsessively hyper-focussing on it.
And so when you try to judo-flip the system, nerds immediately notice the discrepancies, and fixate upon them. And nerds can't always be depended upon to fire up righteous outrage and paint themselves the aggressors: the peculiar detachment of the nerd mind comes into play and the reflexive (exploitable) responses can't always be exploited.
Mask-slips like the handling of this article are FASCINATING. It reveals a system behind the story, and the idea that the system pops up in all sorts of places (and has predictable behaviors) is like a puzzle to be solved :)
Could you elaborate on your "It seems this is an opinion hit piece that is may be inappropriately abusing the upvote system" comment?
How does it "abuse the upvote system"?
EDIT: #10 on the front page after ~10 mins, so maybe you are right (although I don't grok the mechanism).
EDIT2: After 25 points, 6 comments and 21 mins, it's vanished completely, can't find it anywhere! (and it's currently not flagged)
EDIT3: After 33 mins and 39 points it reappeared at #27. Interesting how HN works.
That alone doesn't mean much, the ranking prefers new entries. And if something makes it to anywhere on the front page early, more votes come in and push it up.