

Ask Admins: Why is this submission pushed down? (Screenshot) - lucb1e
http://i.imgur.com/bAkeiXY.png

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lucb1e
I don't mean to start conspiracy theories at all here, but it seems very
strange that this post is pushed down so hard. My best guess is that it has
something to do with flagging, though it seems to make more sense that
flagging merely brings it to mods' attention and doesn't downvote it (else
it's a replacement for the missing downvote button on submissions).

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codezero
Almost every time this happens it's because of the flamewar detection.

When a story gets almost as many comments as upvotes, this factors into its
rank. There are probably other things that cause the flamewar detector to kick
in.

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lucb1e
I see, hmm. On the one hand the flamewar detector makes the community a better
place; on the other it simply suppresses news that triggers opinions, even
though the news itself may be of interest. Not sure that I'm in favor of this,
but thanks for the explanation!

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codezero
Well, if the story got more upvotes, it wouldn't be a problem. It got some
time in the sun, then went away. I think the algo (assuming that's what it is,
and it probably is) works pretty well and it's not a huge loss that things
that are purely about discussion don't sit on the FP for a really long time.

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a3voices
The number of comments makes the rank go down.

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codezero
I don't think it's just the number, but more about the number of top level
threads and the depth of those threads. So if there is one thread with many
replies, it's probably a flame war, or just a back and forth that isn't very
productive.

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Houshalter
Flagging is one explanation although I can't understand why anyone would flag
that article, so that explanation doesn't make sense. HN also heavily punishes
articles with certain undisclosed keywords, but this is very rare (the only
ones I think were discovered was "nsa" and maybe "bitcoin".)

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lucb1e
> why anyone would flag that article

Zhe Russians! ;-)

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wglb
Political stories get flagged and drop off.

