Which bit? The 2010 thing is precisely what happened. It was a case of sleep deprivation, which is one lesson of how trying too hard to make this place good can mess with a person.

The other bit was just my attempt to explain why users might have flagged the post. User flags were what demoted its rank, and it isn't obvious why people flagged it. There's also the issue that meta posts aren't great for HN in the first place, but those rarely lack for upvotes.

It would be nice if there was non-filtered view of HN available for users with a rep above 500, much like the "show dead" option for user comments that have been hidden. Basically allowing the submissions to be placed in the submission rank as if their ranking was not pinged due to users flagging the submission.

I like this idea, but it'd be nice to have it not based on karma (says a person that doesn't comment very often and has low karma).

Understand though I could easily see spammers using the data and getting 500 really should not take more than a month if you post a handful of comments a day; for example: 25 days, 5 comments a day, average of 4 upvotes per comment.

Worth noting with a rep of 500+ HN users are able to downvote comments.

Yeah, and I think the karma system works well overall. It isn't ideal for people that are significantly more consumer than producer of content, but I would guess that is the minority.

I feel there are a lot more consumers than you might imagine, myself included. I'm on HN constantly but I rarely ever comment. The karma system is not for everyone.

I think there are a few people with > 500 karma, more with an account but less karma, and even more without an account.

Pareto principle and all.

I'm not sure why that information would be valuable to spammers. It would only tell them that their posts are being flagged, but it wouldn't really help them get to the front page.

From the point a spammer is identify until their interaction with the system becomes a burden to deal with, it's better to not let them know it's known they a spammer. Craigslist does this by "ghosting" postings that's flagged as spam; that is the spammer sees the posting as live, maybe even gets an automated reply to see how/if they respond, but the general public does not see the posting.

I consume HN via an RSS feed, and it is an excellent experience. I don't need a hivemind to do my filtering and thinking for me.

if you don't need the filtering from the hivemind, you can read https://news.ycombinator.com/newest (I'm not sure if it has a RSS.) Warning: it's full of crap.

And you can enable the showdead flag. Warning: The worst crap is [dead] so this version has even more crap.

Anyway, there are from time to time some interesting articles that are unlucky and don't get even a vote, so after reading the front page please go to the newest page and try to find a hidden jewel there.

PS: There are a few alternative unofficial HN UI. They use alternative orders, probably without the official penalties. For example http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ and https://hckrnews.com/

To be fair, "the feed" (assume you mean the new feed) is populated by the hive, it's just not sorted by votes or any other filter; of course unless the mods remove/hide a submission for some reason.

I'm using /rss - I see a lot of stuff on there that subsequently gets flagged.

It was asked by someone yesterday, but the question got lost in the noise, whether the voting ring detection extends to flagging rings (whether on posts or comments)?

It would be naive to assume that it doesn't happen...

I suspect that in part this is because having HN's actual ranking algorithm as implemented today (including the secret sauce) would not benefit HN.

But this is not just some random meta post it's about ranking algorithms, I think those are doomed to be popular whether it is HN or Reddit.

Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

Nice. Summarizes my longstanding argument with conspiracy theorists.

On the one hand, I'm also skeptical. On the other hand, I could see someone glancing at the date and accidentally reading "Mar 10, 2017" as Mar '10.