It was the second or third article on the frontpage when I commented on it an hour back, but now it is gone: from the front page, the first couple of pages, and from the "newest" pages.
I can see the article by clicking on the link, but otherwise it is as if it doesn't exist anymore. It has 63 points and is 2 hours old, so it "should" be somewhere on the frontpage ... . What happened?
I must say that seeing that link taken down was surprising, since Ethereum is at its core a programming paradigm for decentralized applications + a distribution mechanism.
In fact, the only 'thing' Ethereum borrows from bitcoin/altcoins is the implementation of decentralized consensus at scale, which we believe is applicable not just to currencies, but also the law, entrepreneurship, governance and many other fields.
If people here would like to help us improving our messaging, feel free to post here!! We're really appreciative for any advice, straight from the horse's mouth :)
Normally, we'd kill this post, though, because you're supposed to ask questions like this by emailing us rather than posting it on HN itself. Since the sudden appearance of a new moderator in the threads is a novelty, we'll leave this one open for now.
Sorry for the post; I had quickly checked the guidelines before I posted, but I (think I) missed
"Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com."
(I thought this missing post was some kind of bug in HN but, for some reason, I didn't think of it then as "a thing I would want to tell you".)
Perhaps one day we can add it to the server and give people a way to check this for themselves. (Edit: we eventually did this. Click on the site name after a title.) It'd also be a neat way for users to find old threads. HN's archives are rich.
By the way, the dupe detector, which on HN is porous and largely an honour system, has been misunderstood. In my opinion, it's one of several master-strokes that PG came up with when he designed this site. I should write about that sometime.
In the meanwhile: I find the new algolia hnsearch very useful and pleasant for this purpose. Typing in a few keywords from a story (and very often: from just the title) which I would like to submit, immediately tells me whether it has been submitted (and discussed!) in the recent past. This is great for "personal" use, and perhaps algolia hnsearch has an API which you can leverage for moderation?
My guess is it got flagged enough to drop.
It's annoying that an interesting new tech is flagged down off the front page, but HN has an anti-cryptocurrency contingent.
Doesn't speak well for this community that this happens.
It is weird that anyone would have flagged the Etherium story. The Moderator should pull up the list of people that did that.
What's more likely, though, is that the story was promoted by a voting ring. HN has what I perceive to be a bit of a hair-trigger voting ring detector, which is understandable, because it's pretty intensely targeted by rings. There are some pretty simple things you can do to get your story penalized this way. The best advice for avoiding the problem is to try and make sure your story rises to the front page naturally; think of HN like a pinball machine, and the detector as a "tilt" sensor.
Are the Matasano Crypto Challenges alive? A friend of mine and I sent (first) requests around a week back, and we haven't heard back yet. I understand that real people respond to these requests (at their leisure, I guess) and so turn-around times would be long, but will somebody eventually look at the requests, or is the program on hold/in limbo?
A voting ring is possible, I suppose. Certainly possible that the detector thought there was one, though the story had dozens of votes and comments before it dropped off.
It actually went from #2 to nowhere that I could find it and then showed back up in slot 119. I've seen stuff temporarily vanish like that before (all kinds of topics), not really sure what causes it.
I've recently seen things that behaved like comment voting rings, but that's probably a lot harder to detect, and I can't say for sure it's happening from the available data.
I'd be willing to bet on (1), the ring detector.
Probably it just scrolled off the top few pages... things move pretty quickly on HN sometimes.