Thanks for pointing that out. 4 hours old, 1000+ points, it seems to have been hit with an invisible penalty.

From what I understood, when a new post has a lot of comments, it disappears from the frontpage.

Absolutely absurd and illogical

It's also related to the up votes. A post with a bad comment to up vote ratio usually means that a flame war is going on

>A post with a bad comment to up vote ratio usually means that a flame war is going on.

No it doesn't, not unless most comments typicaly get upvoted, which seems counterintuitive to me.

A bad comment to downvote ratio indicates a flamewar, since there are no flamewars without downvotes, but more comments than upvotes just means high comment velocity (which can go either way) or just that no one is saying anything particularly interesting, which isn't implicitly harmful.

A flamewar detector that hides popular threads to suppress engagement just in case there might be a flamewar is working at cross purposes with the goal of a forum, which is engagement.

It's a measure to halt flamewars

A flamewar detector is absurd and illogical?

Edit: actually it was standard moderation but in a bit of an unclear way - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26894033.

We made a mistake. I'm not sure what happened but it's possible that we mistook this post for garden-variety mailing-list drama. A lot of that comes up on HN, and is mostly not interesting; same with Github Issues drama.

In reality, this post is clearly above that bar—it's a genuinely interesting and significant story that the community has a ton of energy to discuss, and is well on topic. I've restored the thread now, and merged in the dupe that was on the front page in its stead.

Sorry everybody! Our only priority is to serve what the community finds (intellectually) interesting, but moderation is guesswork and it's not always easy to tell what's chaff.