I've been traveling all day and didn't see this, or the emails, until now. These stories were killed by user flags, not moderators. I'll look at the details in a minute. In the meantime, I'm burying this post for what should be an obvious reason: procedural questions about story ranking, and HN support questions in general, are off-topic for HN. The site guidelines explicitly ask you not to post them here.

Edit: I looked at all the flagged stories. I don't think it was a ring. It looks to me like users who feel that the story is off-topic for HN. Perhaps they feel this way more strongly because they're Uber fans—hard to say—but flagging of outrage stories (i.e. high controversy-to-substance ratio) is well-established on HN.

In cases like this, when the community is deeply divided, each side has a reasonable argument, and a large number of users clearly want the story to be discussed here, we usually pick one URL and turn off the flags for that one. If I hadn't been offline, I would have done so earlier.

The problem now is that it's not clear what the best URL is. None of the articles look great. I unkilled the Techcrunch one, but the thread promptly turned into a discussion of its title. If someone can suggest a good choice of URL in the next few minutes, I'll do that again. Otherwise it will have to wait overnight.