In about fifteen minutes this story went from being 9th to 100th. There's no way it could have tripped the flamewar detector as there were only two comments whe

In about fifteen minutes this story went from being 9th to 100th. There's no way it could have tripped the flamewar detector as there were only two comments when I wrote this, and the ranking fell so fast it could not possibly have been natural voting: https://hnrankings.info/40619561/ https://hnrankings.info/40619561/ For those who don't know: the mods have story kill/boost function which will either nerf the story into the ground or boost it well beyond. It adds in an invisible, sizable positive or negative score. I see no legitimate reason for killing this submission. It wasn't a duplicate: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+meta+fraudulent+ads https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+... it's from a long-time, high-karma user, and it was a popular submission with users, climbing rapidly. The story comes from what looks like a legitimate SV-area news site. Someone did it to this story about a DoS vulnerability in NPM that could have stayed with a minor correction to title (changing "javascript" to the more accurate "NPM", although NPM is the defacto package management system so it's debatable): https://hnrankings.info/40619344/ https://hnrankings.info/40619344/ Same thing happened to a link to the blog for a university research group investigating tiktoc's ranking algorithms (the irony...): https://hnrankings.info/40619501/ https://hnrankings.info/40619501/ Someone also did it with a negative story about Adobe's software sprouting a new paragraph in its term and conditions that changed a bunch of language around Adobe's rights to access/use user's works: https://hnrankings.info/40619329/ https://hnrankings.info/40619329/ My guess is that the mod's excuse is that Adobe responded to Mashable stating it doesn't use people's works to train one specific ML system, but that's a snowjob - nothing changed except that now they've pinky-sworn that they won't do what the ToS says they can. This function is clearly being abused and either it needs to be removed, or its use should require that the mod who does it has to enter a reason, and both the username of the mod and the reason are published at the top of the comments page and a marker on the submission list indicates either a score ner or boost by a mod. It's also well past time to remove the flamewar suppressor. It's a sledgehammer that is easily abused; if a company wants to kill a story, all they have to do is get a bunch of accounts to start arguments. It's probably especially easy now that so many people are working remotely, spread out over a large area..