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Comment by BSDobelix | Hacker News Reader

Why is that submission so harshly suppressed? Honest question.

It seems like a pretty lame rug sweep attempt. I understand that the moderation burden of these kind of threads is high and not every moderation action needs to be public. But for something of this significance it is disappointing that there hasn't even been any communication ( that I have seen) and imo is not in the spirit of hackernews.

Users flag stuff. There are lots of topics that tend not to have sane discussions (or simply don't fit HN) and people regularly flag these without any need for 'lame rug sweep attempts'. But if you're concerned about that you can always email the mods and ask.

It's not flagged, it got pretty fast to 120 upvotes witch is normally a top page 1 submission.

But it was in the lower page 2, 10 minutes later page 4, so yes it is definitely a 'lame rug sweep attempt', all the "Maintainer removed" submissions in fact are suppressed, so i ask why is this? Is it not a:

[1] "What to Submit: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

it is flagged now

That one is not:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41934219

Page 1 with 27 points ;)

EDIT: 2 minutes later away from page 1 and completely flagged with removed title

[flagged] [dead]

Ah ok, thx

It has [flagged] now which almost always reflects user flagging. People don't agree on what's interesting but many HN users agree flamewars are not interesting.

Flame-war in the comments right? But here the submission is flagged.

EDIT: 2 minutes later away from page 1 and completely flagged with removed title (still thinking it's user-side flagging?)

People flag things that generate flamewars and this topic has generated a bunch, beside having had some front page time in various guises and extensive 'discussions'.

EDIT: 2 minutes later away from page 1 and completely flagged with removed title (still thinking it's user-side flagging?)

I'm not sure what that means but things that drop off the fp and gain the [flagged] tag are just about always flagged by users. Flagged submissions lose rank through user flags long before they get tagged [flagged].

> EDIT: 2 minutes later away from page 1 and completely flagged with removed title (still thinking it's user-side flagging?)

yes, that's effect of user flags. Just more of them came.

I have not seen removed titles just from flagging, maybe i am wrong here (over flagging maybe removes the title?)

Flagging does not remove titles. Maybe you don't have showdead turned on?

Hey thank you very much (showdead was turned off)

> Flame-war in the comments right? But here the submission is flagged.

Things touching a highly-charged political matters (e.g., the Russo-Ukrainian war and sanctions regimes associated therewith), tend to attract user flags, perhaps in part because they are seen as likely political flamewar topics, or at least sources of unproductive discussion as interested parties from both sides descend to push their propaganda while blaming any negative karma on the posts from their side on a conspiracy of the opposing side to silence them rather than a response to their combative, hostile tone approach.

In that case I would classify the flagging automated system as it is implemented as a lame rug sweep. It's a dark pattern. You see it all the time as a way to avoid accountability under the guise of user/community self determination.

Every thread about this is filled with Russian apologists.

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