[flagged]
That's not true, and I don't know what you mean by "superusers".
Is that the ranking algorithm? It felt suspicious that these headlines were getting substantial early HN user attention (double digits) but not showing up on the home page.
I know HN isn't a gossip rag, and that we don't tar and feather people, but the story did feel notable.
All of the submissions on this topic are being flagged off the frontpage by users, not moderators.
At the time I came across these threads, none of these submissions were "[flagged]" (or at least not indicated as such in the UI). They had 10-30ish upvotes, all were under an hour old, and yet they were buried on the first and second pages of "new".
Do articles that are flagged once or twice get internally penalized and de-ranked but not shown as "[flagged]" yet in the UI until they accumulate more flagging?
"Once or twice" isn't quite accurate but otherwise, yes, that's how it works.
It's common for sensational and/or outrageous stories to make the frontpage because those qualities attract upvotes. They also, however, attract flags. The latter take longer to kick in because many flags come from users who only see the story once it has made the frontpage.
This tug-of-war between upvotes and flags is the core of HN's frontpage is determined. There are additional factors, such as moderation downweights (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but we haven't applied those in this case.
In other words, all you're seeing here is very much a community verdict according to the standard rules by which HN operates. Sometimes people make grandiose claims about sinister censorship beyond that; but they're doing that because of their own priors, which for whatever reason cause them to misinterpret what they're seeing.
None of this is secret, in the sense that people are always welcome to ask what's going on and we're happy to answer. Of course, you have to trust us enough to believe the answer, but that'll always be the case no matter what we do.