Can any1 explain how HN algo works that this post, which at time of writing has 355p, 180comments while being posted 1 hour ago, isn't even on first page (ranked 31)???
The 'customer support of last resort' genre is common and not usually a good fit for HN [1]. If people feel this story is unusually relevant and interesting, I'm not sure I agree—long experience has taught us that one-sided articles like this nearly always leave out critical information—but I also don't mind yielding in an occasional specific case, so I've rolled back the penalties on this thread.
The issue from our point of view is not about story X or company Y—it's a systemic one: the most popular genres of submission (especially the rage-inducing ones) get massively over-represented by default, so countervailing mechanisms are needed [2] if we're to have a space for the more intellectually curious stories that the site is meant for.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I do admit that I originally drafted this article as a "customer support of last resort", since that seems to work well for CF specifically. But it's too late for that anyways by now - the problem is "resolved" by fire and we don't plan to move back.
I purely posted it now as a precautionary tale for other people because of all the pain it has caused us. So the audience is tech people in most companies of small size that will hit more traffic at some point in the future.
Whoever runs that team really, really gets off on being withholding, as Buster Bluth would say.
They say it's because if such teams don't operate under secret protocols, the "bad guys" will discover the loopholes in them. But I rather suspect that this has more to do with evading legal liability.
They're already off Cloudflare, I would see this story more as "Dealing with tech company X is a business risk" cautionary tale.
As I said above, we're happy to make exceptions for the occasional thread that is genuinely of interest, but sometimes the process for idenitfying those is "apply standard penalties -> generate howls of protest -> eventually find out about community pushback (e.g. in this case someone emailed hn@ycombinator.com) -> restore post".
I understand all the complexities here. Have worked closely with a Trust and Safety team before (real estate portal). But if that business was good enough to exist on the CF network for X years, it should be given time to move if it's no longer an agreeable business partner, that makes it a worthy story.
puts on tin foil hat and looks around nervously
They are valuable in keeping people aware of what’s going on. But only to a point and people will endlessly argue over where that point is and scream censorship and over ups by corporate interests.
It gets rather grating after a while. Even more so when I suspect an article is omitting key facts to generate the attention they want.
I haven’t flagged this article but I can easily see why people would.
Moderator action seems unlikely because it’s still on the second page.
If a thread is too interesting, it gets penalized, can't have too many people commenting on an exciting topic