No. HN doesn't work like that. HN is actually fairly democratic. Once you have a certain amount of karma, you are able to flag posts. If enough people flag a p

No. HN doesn't work like that. HN is actually fairly democratic. Once you have a certain amount of karma, you are able to flag posts. If enough people flag a post it gets removed. My understanding is dang doesn't explicitly remove anything that isn't spam, in fact, he's usually responsible for un-flagging things that get flagged. This post was flagged and got unflagged. Flagging being one way things get removed. An additional element of moderation is an algorithm that looks for controversy. It calculates a score based on number of comments, number of upvotes, number of flags, and aggregated downvotes. If anything looks divisive, then it is probably not "curiosity provoking," and instead something that invites flame wars. If a post is determined to be controversial (which is likely an invisible flag) it gets automatic down ranking and usually kicked off the front page. This is algorithmic moderation. dang doesn't want HN to be a battleground, and so the automatic moderation makes it so that if you can't play nice (downvote or flag too many people) you can't have the conversation. This, of course, is vulnerable to attack as all systems are, so for real news rather than fight provoking op-ed, dang removes the invisible "controversial" flag which lets the raw time + upvotes score manage the ranking. The short version is that for HN moderation there is a dispassionate algorithm that punishes "fights" and sometimes dang actively performs an action that lets the fight happen, but he doesn't actively stop fight provoking content.