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Comment by fairity | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

This has been something like 80% of all the moderator commentary on HN for the past week, it has a totally predictable explanation that is in line with a decade of HN moderation practice, and the question itself is (and always has been) off-topic. It's not "technically" against the guidelines; it's flatly against them. Take questions about moderation to email: hn@ycombinator.com.

For anyone who, like me, isn't aware of the "totally predictable explanation", here's more background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978340

Tldr; The reason it dropped off the first page was likely due to mass flagging. Whether these flags were coordinated at the behest of a self-interested party is unclear. However, when cases like this are reported, more often than not, it turns out to be a function of genuine flagging.

I came here via the front page, and with 200 comments and over 200 points, how do you think people found this submission?

I didn't see it anywhere, I had to search "OpenAI" and sort by date to see any discussion. And then one of those discussions linked to this one, which didn't appear in the search.

I had to search for it

Same, with 700 comments. It's currently on #37.

I wonder that as well. I'm pretty sure there's manual manipulation involved sometimes.

There's always manual manipulation. In the early days of the site, the saying was "without manual manipulation, the front page would be nothing but cat pictures". Today, it's clear that it would be nothing but Musk stories.

Nothing but cat pictures, I miss the old internet.

I'm actually completely fine with internal manual manipulation, bc I trust the HN crew.

I'm concerned that what we're observing is a result of external manipulation at the behest of self-interested parties.

Here's evidence of this concern: https://hnrankings.info/43004889/

Thinking about it, I consider it possible that pg is afraid of the Trump administration. He rightfully called David Sacks names for his actions in the Parker Conrad case. It might be subjective, but I believe that since the election, his language on his Twitter feed has changed significantly as well. I believe he wants no further conflict - the paypal mafia has too much power to harm him now.

pg has not moderated Hacker News, nor been operationally involved in YC, for over a decade.

I was thinking the same thing. I submitted the link only to find this thread.

That's called 'deduplication'.

I guess they are down modding the Musk stuff as they figure there's enough Musk discussion?

It's currently #48 on the HN front page list.

Personally I don't use that anymore and use the algoria top results for the past 24 hours which is not affected by mods, flagging and the like.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=&query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...

It's #3 on that.

Might have tripped the flame-war detector? It goes off when there's a high comment-to-vote ratio.

It's near the top now - just saw it this way. Weird though.

These kinds of controversial submissions do end up appearing in https://hckrnews.com/

It's taking quite a journey on and off the frontpage: https://hnrankings.info/43004889/

I'm surprised too, as this is extremely pertinent to Y-Combinator and the community at-large. Seems like something that would be stuck #1 spot for a few hours but that's up to the community to decide. Maybe we're all moving on from the OpenAI hype thing.

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