I still browse HN daily, but I lost confidence in the moderators after I posted an article that trended rapidly with an interesting, useful discussion and then

I still browse HN daily, but I lost confidence in the moderators after I posted an article that trended rapidly with an interesting, useful discussion and then suddenly dropped off the front page. I asked the moderators why this happened. Their explanation was that the article I posted was a duplicate, and therefore created a distraction for readers who wanted to comment on new material. This struck me as total bullshit, but I tried to be constructive and proposed a method of merging multiple threads on the same article. I never got a response.