Y'all are way out in the weeds here. This story tripped the overheated discussion detector, which we've just turned off. There actually aren't many flags, and

Y'all are way out in the weeds here. This story tripped the overheated discussion detector, which we've just turned off. There actually aren't many flags, and one of the main reasons why it isn't ranked higher is that most of the upvotes were dropped by the anti-abuse software. When users start speculative meta subthreads like this, it foments a kind of disconnected conspiracy thinking that we can't seem to help ourselves from. You can email us and get the answer to exactly what's going on in a few minutes! But that's not what most choose—we'd rather wring our hands and imagine demons. If we could do this a bit less, Hacker News would be more intellectually interesting.