Seems unlikely. The author is a Google employee and mentions it in the post.

Not just any Google employee either!

What is the alternate explanation of the points / time / rank then?

And the upthread point about this being a Google employee seem to miss the actual content which is highly critical of Google. And there's absolutely a history of threads highly critical of Google getting flagged down on HN.

I think there is a small faction of anti-Google readers on HN, and then a larger set of people that don't care one way or the other, taking each story at face value. I know there are quite a few of the anti-Google faction that follow me around on HN and try to drag me into arguments about Google in completely unrelated stories. That's why I don't comment much anymore.

With that in mind, and given that HN's ranking algorithm is secret, it seems unfair to accuse a hivemind of intentionally messing with the algorithm to suppress commentary about their employer. Maybe it's a bug. Maybe it's working as intended.

Could one of the HN admins comment? Do you guys notice a lot of Google-related stories getting flagged?

> Do you guys notice a lot of Google-related stories getting flagged?

Not particularly. Controversial stories reliably get lots of upvotes and flags. As far as I can tell, one could replace "Google" with "*" and the same statements would hold.

I'm going to detach this subthread as off-topic now.

Ooh, that's a nice trick!