7 ms·

Just for the record, it was neither flagging nor manual moderation that caused it to drop off.

• nh 13y ago
  so just like comedy, timing is everything?
• gress 13y ago
  What was it then?
  • pg 13y ago
    It set off the voting ring detector.
    • gress 13y ago
      Was it a false alarm?
      • ssclafani 13y ago
        Votes made from an article's direct link (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854) don't count towards its rank and too many of them will set of the voting ring detector (this is why it's a bad idea to link directly to a HN submission from your blog or from Twitter/Facebook). This is probably what happened here.
        • Zaephyr 13y ago
          Wait...what? I am not suppose to upvote from the article page but the main pages? I know I'm new here, but I find that counter-intuitive and disappointing that I've been doing wrong. Wouldn't it make sense to remove the upvote option on the article page, surely I'm not the only one who got this wrong (I hope).
          • kilovoltaire 13y ago
            I think it's based on referrer, not where you actually do the upvote. I.e. if you get to the article page from the main page, then that's fine. But if you arrive there with no referrer or from somewhere else, then it isn't counted, since quite possibly someone sent you the specific article just to upvote it. At least that's how I understand it...
  • Crito 13y ago
    PG has said in the past that there is a flamewar detector, and that it suppresses discussions. In the past, this has been triggered on certain Microsoft related articles, which has caused several people to claim that there is some sort of ring of HN users who strategically flag articles about Microsoft off the page (and depending on who you ask, they also vote up Google articles). Ironically, it seems that at least some of the people making these claims were sock-puppeting themselves. PG's comment explaining it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596311 In fact this article does consider the flamewar detector. How accurate it is in it's claims, I do not know.
    • twelvechairs 13y ago
      so the outcome is 'flame people and the discussion you don't like will disappear'?
      • pg 13y ago
        Except if you do that you risk being banned yourself.
        • Uhhrrr 13y ago
          'Flame people with a throwaway and the discussion you don't like will disappear'?
          • pg 13y ago
            That would be conspicuous and easy to prevent/ignore.
      • chc 13y ago
        No, not really.