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About a year ago, a friend wrote a good post about diversity in hackathons which was submitted to HN and hit #2 quickly, then dropped down to the second page in an instant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495950

Not many people commented on it. I believe the flame-war detector only takes significant effect when # comments > # points, which is a pretty good heuristic for a flame war that has gone out of control.

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For what it's worth at this late date, that post set off the voting ring detector. No users flagged it and no moderator moderated it.

That clarifies that mystery :P. Thanks!

Any chance of getting some transparency of what automated or manual processes have affected a particular story (ie, on the story comment page itself), possibly delayed by some period to prevent bad actors from realising their voting rings or whatever were discovered?

Haha it's funny that you've cited that post as I'm complaining that it's getting flagged in the comments... I guess the point is that HN is a black box to us regular users and it's tough to speculate on how and why threads move as they do.

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