Apologies for going meta but: is something up with the ranking algorithm lately? I’m surprised that this fell to the second page so quickly given the number of points and recency of submission (there are older articles with less points above it, and it doesn’t strike me as a topic that would elicit a lot of flags)
It set off the flamewar detector. We've turned that off now.
Ah, thanks for the explanation! I’ve seen another instance recently that I suspect was the same thing; I wonder if the flamewar detector has false positives when a story happens to be one that a lot of people want to talk about.
It does, and we review those and mostly catch the false positives, though it can take a while. I have the software email me about every case actually.