> I don't think that's a factor affecting ranking - big amount of user flags (for the whole thread) and "flame-war detector" ("when the number of comments on a

> I don't think that's a factor affecting ranking - big amount of user flags (for the whole thread) and "flame-war detector" ("when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score") do affect ranking negatively though, so I guess dang manually removed downranking factors for that thread. It's not just dang modding anymore (citation: an email to me on Nov. 4), as I understand it. So it sounds like someone else made that call if that's what happened. The majority of HN's rules were violated repeatedly all over that thread, including the submission itself - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. But the problem is that rules also exist around meta-discussion of HN's own discussion quality, and it's a poor experience when discussion quality is slipping if there's not also an avenue to reasonably meta-discuss why that's the case, either as a consequence of how the platform is operating or as an outcome of society's direction in a broader sense.