Users are flagging these posts. The HN community is divided. Some people think that there are too many NSA stories; others, too few. On any issue where the community is divided, upvotes compete with flags, and stories rise and fall according to the tug of war.
The HN software adds a small default weight to NSA stories. The purpose of this is obviously not to suppress them. If we were trying to do that, it would be a large weight and not a small one. Instead, it's tuned so that NSA stories can still easily make the front page—and so they do. It's an attempt to strike a balance between the different segments of the community who strongly disagree with one another about how much NSA is the right amount of NSA.
The story last night about Muslim leaders was not much affected by the software. If users hadn't flagged it, it would certainly have stayed on the front page. In my view, users were right to flag it. I hope this site never sees another thread where a large class of fellow citizens are accused en masse of being fifth columnists and rapists. If we do, I trust that users will flag it again.
Some of you feel that such stories are so important that the flamewars around them should just be allowed to burn. Our experience and observation suggest the contrary: they are bad—existentially bad—for the site. Like fire in general, they lead to more of the same. So the alternative to the current policy is conflagration. The best aspects of HN, in our view, would not survive this.