
Ask HN Moderators: Why did my submission suddenly drop off the front page? - rquantz
I don&#x27;t mean to seem like sour grapes, I&#x27;m genuinely curious what happened here. The post was on the front page, gathering upvotes pretty steadily, and then suddenly disappeared from the rankings entirely. Was it flagged? Did it trip some filter I&#x27;m unaware of? Did I refresh the page too many times because I was somewhat embarrassingly excited that something I submitted actually got on the front page?<p>The submission: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10515961
The HN rankings graph: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;10515961&#x2F;
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nkurz
If you don't get an answer here, write a short email to "hn@ycombinator.com"
and ask. That's the "officially correct" approach. I've asked some similar
questions myself, and feel I've always gotten honest (and reasonable) answers.

The other big variable (that is sometimes the answer to my questions) is the
"flamewar detector". I don't know the algorithm, but stories that are
receiving more comments than upvotes are sometimes penalized in a way that is
hard to distinguish from the outside from user flagging.

For this story, user flagging does seem like a likely explanation. I think it
would be good to have some more discussion on whether the current system
works, whether it will continue to work in the future, and how it might be
modified to do so better.

~~~
rquantz
The official response is that it was flagged heavily. dang notes that climate
change submissions have tended to lead to flame wars in the past, so those
posts tend to get a lot of flags now.

It's a shame, because I thought the discussion on the post was fairly
constructive, and it was an interesting angle. I suppose there are other
places to discuss the many many issues surrounding climate change, but I don't
know of anywhere with as knowledgeable a user base. I'd like to see HN find a
way to keep the topic available for discussion while keeping the discussion
civil.

~~~
brudgers
To a first approximation, the conversation was fairly constructive compared to
the rest of the internet and compared to the rest of HN fairly non-
constructive. There's a lot of undesirable behavior for HN by my reckoning. My
take is that certain topics attract people who are hell bent on exhibiting a
set of undesirable behaviors. It's unfortunate, but HN's smart people are
still people. On the bright side there are many amazingly good conversations
here.

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cryptoz
I am also curious why this post disappeared so quickly. It is a common theme
among climate change posts on Hacker News; they rarely stay alive for more
than about 30 minutes. Usually the cause is repeated user flags, but I don't
know for sure if that's what happened here. The last time I submitted a
popular climate change post, it was never allowed on the front page because
the source was considered low-quality (Rolling Stone). However, this article
was published in the New York Times, a source considered very high-quality by
this community. So my best guess is user flags.

Any comment from dang or the other mods?

~~~
rquantz
So HN can't discuss climate change because there are a few people who
reflexively flag any climate change related articles? It seems like there
needs to be a way to guard against that.

~~~
lewisl9029
This sounds like an abuse of the flagging system. Shouldn't users who
repeatedly use their flags on legitimate stories like this eventually lose
their ability to flag?

~~~
hguant
The problem is that there is no objective means of determining a "legitimate
story". That's why we have votes and flags and whatnot. The assumption is that
the community will follow the rules and use those tools to promote
"legitimate" content, however, "legitimate" or good is inherently subjective.
You can punish people for having an opinion and using the tools provided by
the site to express that opinion.

~~~
lewisl9029
By legitimate, I meant "not off topic" as defined in the HN guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

The guidelines also state clearly that flagging should only be used for
something that is spam or off topic, not for expressing disagreement. And I
think users who consistently flag stories about climate change (if such users
do in fact exist) are clearly using flags for the latter purpose which it was
not intended for, and deserve to be penalized.

------
dustingetz
Did you put it on Twitter? There's a vote ring detector

~~~
rquantz
I didn't. The one thing I thought I might have done wrong was I commented with
a link to an article with some additional background information, and then
decided to submit that link as well.

~~~
brudgers
I strongly doubt that that had anything to do with it. Submitting more
interesting content is typically encouraged.

