You seem to be under a mistaken impression of how HN works. Upvotes are an important signal but far from the only one. If HN were to go by upvotes alone, it would consist of little more than sensational flamewars about the same few hot topics over and over again (plus tons of meta drama). This is a weakness of the upvoting system. Lots of past explanation about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

Since HN's mandate is not to be that, we have to have countervailing mechanisms to compensate for that weakness. Otherwise the system would get stuck in one of its failure modes. The countervailing mechanisms include things like flags, software mechanisms (including automated up- and down-weights) and moderation (including manual downweights and other interventions). All this is happening all the time. If it weren't, HN would be a completely different place.

None of this is secret; it's not all transparent in the sense that we don't publish a full log of all the factors, but we're happy to answer specific questions.