The charts at hnrankings.com can give you an idea of what happened to it: http://hnrankings.info/11372264/ http://hnrankings.info/11372264/ Among the things th

The charts at hnrankings.com can give you an idea of what happened to it: http://hnrankings.info/11372264/ http://hnrankings.info/11372264/ Among the things that can cause big drops: User flagging. Administrative action. Staleness (some number of hours on front page) Flamewar detector (flurry of responses to responses) It's difficult to distinguish between these from the outside, but a polite email to Dan (hn@ycombinator.com) will probably get you a specific answer if you are interested. Based on asking about similar stories, this one would be a tossup between "Flamewar" and "User flags".