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minimaxir's "List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors" proposes something similar. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flame-

• smoldesu 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure some topics are just outright muted to prevent abuse (not that it's a bad thing). For example, if you were on /new over the past 6 months, it was extremely common to see a "Twitter"-titled article get 20+ upvotes and never see the frontpage. People were outright obsessing over Twitter, posting everything they could find, no matter how benign or uninteresting it's content was. Locking the topic until verifiably interesting things happen was a great solution. It probably works similarly for other keywords, too.
• bookofjoe 4y ago
  Thanks for pointing me here. Much that is new to this longtime poster/reader.
• gus_massa 4y ago
  It was published in the public version of 2009 https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/9f2e1dd53b5b66bb4d65a33d09d403f1a656f8f6/news.arc#L293-L306 https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/9f2e1dd53b5b66bb4... Look for "contro-factor" (i.e. controversial-factor). This is old code, and the mods make tweaks here and there without warning, so the details may have changed. (I'm not sure if gravity changed from 1.8 to 1.6 (???).) I didn't test it personally, but it feels like HN is using something very similar. And there are a few black box analysis of the sorting of the front page that got similar results. Also, minimaxir is the kind of person that is probably running an script to use the HN API to verify the claims.