From what I understood many articles are flagged automatically based on certain rules, like spotting attempts of gaming the voting system. Of course it can have

From what I understood many articles are flagged automatically based on certain rules, like spotting attempts of gaming the voting system. Of course it can have false positives, but I don't think there's any malice involved here. And while I agree that there have definitely been instances of articles being buried due to miss-usage of the "flag" link (which is necessary IMHO) or to overzealous moderators flagging based on certain topics, I don't remember seeing censorship because of a conflict of interest with YCombinator. Of course, I could be wrong - I used to think that Slashdot wouldn't ban negative pieces on Sourceforge either.