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Comment by codr7 | Hacker News Reader

This post just leapt 10 positions down on the front page.

Never saw that before.

Bizarre. I also saw this. The thread went from nothing to [flagged][dead] over the course of about a minute without going through an intermediary [flagged] phase. Fortunately, it's vouched back to life for the time being.

Yesterday, I posted an "Ask HN" on the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42892245

I wonder if there's some sort of coordinated flagging of Musk-related topics going on, especially given Musk's ongoing (and possibly illegal) government interference. The fact that the flags seem to come so rapidly (enough to mark [dead] within ~30s) is suspicious to me. Can dang comment on this?

> I wonder if there's some sort of coordinated flagging of Musk-related topics going on

my impression as well

Flags and vouching come more from the user base than from dang who more often trails in late.

There are very strong pro and anti Musk camps on HN, evidenced in any Musk related thread. These are not necc. large populations but they are quite active.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens all the time, you just happened to notice this one. It's not only Musk-related posts, either. Negative submissions about Altman also get flagged and disappeared. The mods don't seem very interested in countering this behavior. Often it's weakly supported by claiming the discussion is low quality. (Which is often true, but not imho a good enough reason to suppress the topic rather than enforcing comment guidelines.)

> Can dang comment on this?

LOL! The naivete...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902355 also disappeared from the front page very suddenly earlier. This also gave me the impression there's either more active moderation of a certain class of stories atm, or the audience is flagging them a fair bit.

probably both.

That one also was heavily flagged by users and set off the flamewar detector. We turned those off on that one.

Thanks for following up dang.

It has been heavily flagged by users and also set off the flamewar detector.

Nah this happens a lot on HN, every so often I see something interesting on mobile, and go to reply on desktop maybe 10, 20 minutes later and I just can't find the link anymore at all without directly typing the id from mobile into the address bar, shit just disappears entirely on a regular basis. Not even flagged, deleted, or anything obviously wrong with the post at all, they just get silently delisted.

I really recommend a RSS reader for this reason, it does not have bias.

i would recommend: https://hn.algolia.com/

with "last 24 hours" selected

it shows all submissions and cuts through the censorship

I flagged this because watching rich tech bros slap each other around is not something I consider to be a thought provoking topic for discussion.

I think the community can learn from it.

it is also about learning who this guy who is already impacting the lives of uncounted people

Flagging makes things disappear, it's bad when it happens to truth.

There are plenty of true things that are not relevant or productive topics here.

And the future of the US and Tesla is two of them according to who exactly?

Seemingly, enough of the community. Things are flagged and vouched for by humans who use this site.

Yeah, or external agents trying to control the flow of information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com