I thought this was a joke comment but I went back after reading the comments and it’s now on the second page already.

It was at #3 for me and then suddenly demoted to the second page. It's pretty common for these touchy-YC threads.

Page 3 now.

211 points in an hour, and now page 4.

#10 on the front page now

It's less common than it would be for comparable threads on other topics. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41511529 for more explanation.

I really, really hope they don't.

Aaaaand it's gone.

This makes me sad.

@dang, can you comment on that? I appreciate your integrity.

We didn't see it or demote it—it set off the flamewar detector. I've turned that off now, in keeping with the principle described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41511529.

p.s. @dang is a no-op - I only saw this thread because I was doing our standard review of the flamewar detector. If you want guaranteed* message delivery, [email protected] is the only way.

* Well, mostly guaranteed. I assume there are a few that fail to get noticed in the spam bin, though we check that pretty carefully.

That's awfully convenient. You don't moderate the content, your flame war detector goes off, and the algorithm removes it for you.

HN, as with virtually all user-generated content sites, leverages both member actions and automation heavily.

Annually HN sees about 150k active users, 400k stories, and 4m comments:

<https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective> (2021 retrespective by Whaly.io).

It has one public-facing moderator (and apparently a few others who don't post publicly on the site). HN's own mods see very little of the total site content. Automation and member votes, flags, and vouches, as well as emails to the mods, are what keep HN humming. Not perfectly, but quite frankly one of the better-run online discussion sites, and one whose quality has remained remarkably steady over nearly 20 years.

If you see something you think isn't right (bad content not flagged, good content flagged, whatever, email the mods, and they'll take a look. I do this a lot myself, usually with positive results.

I understand why people assume we do that, but actually we do the opposite—that is, we moderate less when YC or a YC startup is part of a story. There is plenty of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

Note: we still moderate such threads. We just do it less than we otherwise would.