I remember that. It was my first thought. This userscript blocking snowdenposts got wiped from the list of posts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929494 and you couldn't find it on HN or AskHN.

That one fell in rank because it was flagged by users at the time.

Right, not over administrative action, just that despite there being lots of people who liked it, the majority usually wants this content.

Unfortunately, the public only agrees to forget things that would be good for them to remember. Since this is going to be bad for a lot of people, it's definitely here to stay.

We can forget some bad things too!

A good one might be:

Ask HN: can we please stop allowing cherry-picked examples of AI on the front page?

I'd say that's more or less covered by the general rule we've developed over the years for major ongoing topics (MOTs), which is to downweight followups unless they contain significant new information (SNI). Most likely yet-another-cherry-picked-AI-example posts don't qualify as SNI. If people see those on the front page they can flag them and/or let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The tech itself is moving so fast that there is a lot of SNI, plus a lot of good articles/blog posts/reflections on what's happening. I guess the goal would be to keep the highest quality stuff and filter out the copycat stuff. Which is which that is open to interpretation, of course, but it's not completely subjective either.