This question, phrased in the general case, is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. (Look for "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?")

In the present case, users flagged it and it set off the flamewar detector. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42857139.

The general gist of it is "well, everyone else likes this so you should be okay with it too". Usually the person arguing in that direction is one of "everyone else".

I've never found it super convincing.

Personally, I don't actually think that the technical discourse here is super great- occasionally I see things from highly knowledgeable folks, but a lot of the time it's just hacks out a hackin.

HN is a forum run by venture capitalists and folks who are tied to that either aspirationally or professionally.

I get a lot of information about how that group of folks thinks from this site, and I find it helpful in understanding their affect on the world I live in.

You're welcome to have whatever preferences you have for the site, but it's not how I have been interacting with it for the last decade.

To the point about flagging, I am always surprised how willing folks are to believe that every other social media algo is gamed, but just assumed that there is no manipulation going on with their own media consumption.

I mean, go write a bot to flag stuff using ghost accounts, I don't care- I get my "HN front page" from a set of search terms, which will show a lot of dead and flagged content. It's pretty trivial to see what happens if you're looking to know that kind of thing, and other folks have written at least two tracking systems I know of for killed HN content.

I can totally buy that the reality of empire and its internal contradictions are uncomfortable enough for the tech bros that seem to make up the most of the site. The idea that they reflexively repress anything "political" sounds reasonable.

That doesn't seem like a great premise, but I buy it better than the idea that I should be beholden to that same ideal in my use of the site.

As a non-American, this is massive on its own, and could be absolutely world-changing depending on how it evolves. The US are where they are thanks to a great brain drain, powered by both industry and government money. Messing with this will have consequences, particularly coupled with visa restrictions. Or not, if Trump flip-flops once more. In any case, this is very important news for any technology- or science-adjacent field, including health and medicine.

I know it's satisfying, but that's a risky way to think if you care about the truth.

Users flagged the submission and it also set off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector.

No mods or admins touched this post. , or even saw it until someone sent an email about it. Then I turned off the flags and the flamewar penalty.

I have to be very careful in my support for the "wrong" side in touchy topics lest I be down-voted and flooded with low-effort jabs by frankly very smart and knowledgeable people. These people can bash me with their "intelligence" despite them many times being wrong or not understanding my point or seeing that we have simply have different principles manifesting in different views. This transcends tech, politics and any other realm we regularly discuss here.

You made it sound like you were linking to evidence, but it’s just another post by yourself making the same unsubstantiated claim. That’s worth nothing. If anything, dang has shown over time they avoid silencing these discussions, it’s obvious users are the flaggers.