In case anyone hasn't seen my other posts about this:
(1) I had no idea this story existed and woke up to claims that I was obviously* suppressing it.
(2) I looked into it and found that no moderator had touched either of the two submissions of the story, but that both submissions had set off HN's voting ring detector. (Whether there was a voting ring or not, I don't know - that software isn't perfect. It has held up well over the years though.)
(3) We merged the two discussions and placed the merged thread on the front page.
>I had no idea this story existed and woke up to claims that I was obviously* suppressing it.
To be fair, it seems you’re saying the submission was being suppressed, just not intentionally. Lots of props of course for transparency and reboosting the story
When people use the word "suppressed" they usually mean that we were personally intervening to do something suppressive. This being the internet, they say that with supreme confidence whether it's true or not.
For example, the comment I was referring to, which was the first one I saw, said "It is being suppressed by @dang" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457010). You can't get more personal, definitive, or wrong than that.
Okay but my comment here said that it was being suppressed (intentionally?).
In my other comment, I actually did not mean to write “it is being suppressed by dang” but rather “it is being suppressed @dang”… Because my impression is that that alerts you somehow? I may be wrong about this.
Please give your long-time readers the benefit of the doubt. I was correct that it was being suppressed. I'm also very thankful for your moderation of the site. I know you do a lot of hard work on that front.
HN would be an entirely different place if people could just arrange to get their stuff upvoted onto the front page! We've spent hundreds of hours working on this over the years. Still not perfect of course.
My theory is that a lot of people may have looked for a story like this on the home page and then searched ‘Delve’ to see if anything was submitted recently and then upvoted one of those recently submitted posts.
(1) I had no idea this story existed and woke up to claims that I was obviously* suppressing it.
(2) I looked into it and found that no moderator had touched either of the two submissions of the story, but that both submissions had set off HN's voting ring detector. (Whether there was a voting ring or not, I don't know - that software isn't perfect. It has held up well over the years though.)
(3) We merged the two discussions and placed the merged thread on the front page.
(4) Why? Because we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of a story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... This is literally the #1 principle of moderation in the sense that it was the very first thing that pg drilled into me: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble/