Obviously we don't publish how HN's voting ring detector works. If we did, it would quickly stop working. What matters in this case is (1) it's a software pena

Obviously we don't publish how HN's voting ring detector works. If we did, it would quickly stop working. What matters in this case is (1) it's a software penalty that has nothing to do with the content of a story, (2) moderators didn't touch the submissions or even know they existed, and (3) once we did know that they existed, we merged the threads and placed the story on the frontpage - that is, we went out of our way to give this story more attention, not less - in keeping with the principle explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....