We've moved most comments to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12725427.

I was reading this post when it was still number 11 on the front page, went for lunch and came back, and now it is number 67 on page 3 ...

Does anybody know why this happened? During this last hour the post went from 91 to 140 points so it's not like it wasn't popular.

This story is now 7 hours old with 164 points, but on page 5.

I count 6 stories on the front page that are older than this with less points, e.g:

  9. Virus stole poison genes from black widow spider (bbc.com)
     155 points by kawera 10 hours ago | hide | 25 comments

Is HN censoring?

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12727186.

It's political, so it's probably being flagged and demoted for that reason.

It's probably triggering the flamewar detector, and getting demoted for that reason.

There's probably no need for active censorship by the mods to explain the observed results.

There was another submission that was on the front page half an hour ago with only a few comments (so no flamewar) and appears to have been directly removed by a mod: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724507

There's no read for "real" censorship if your algorithms take care of all the threads you'd find objectionable.

Of course the existing moderation policy constitutes a background of censorship, so your claims should be evaluated within that contest.

In the sense that all systems of deciding what to publish and how are censorship, sure.

It is now in number 110 in page 4, among much older stories.

I came here looking for it and had to search for "assage" past 24 hours to find it. Something is up. There are things on the front page that are older with less votes.

Same thing happened with another submission on the same story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724507

IIRC HN threads have historically gotten dinged for having a large number of comments, relative to their upvotes. This is supposed to dampen threads that are just flame-bait without being particularly interesting.

So posting 27 comments about "why is this thread not higher up???" just makes the problem worse :-)

It has more up votes than comments, and has a ratio quite common with many of the existing front page stories...

[deleted]

That's from four years ago.