Stallman resignation story disappeared from front page

There is no new or intellectually gratifying ground to cover with this. People have made up their minds, joined their tribes, drawn their lines in the sand and are just throwing bottles at one another at this point. If the subject of these threads weren't Richard Stallman, but some other celebrity, they would all be flagged as mainstream news and flamebait and rightly so.

Let me save everyone the trouble and condense 90% of the state of these threads now and in the future:

- Richard Stallman did nothing wrong, this is just character assassination by the feminist media complex.

- Richard Stallman did nothing wrong, this is just an attack on free software by corporate interests.

- Richard Stallman did nothing wrong, insert tedious, pedantic argument about age of consent and assault here.

- You can't prove Marvin Minsky did anything wrong either.

(...)

- Richard Stallman was actually a sexist creep who had no concept of consent and the many, many stories about his behavior towards women finally caught up with him.

  - Richard Stallman did nothing wrong.

The story is worth talking about, but it doesn't deserve more coverage than it's getting here.

My best guess is that the slightly quicker drop-off was caused by the number of comments exceeding the number of upvotes triggering the "flame war" detector.

There are a number of posts that talk about how HN ranking works, here are the few I could find:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9426040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16018430

The discussion became a dumpster fire / flamewar and was probably repeatedly flagged.

Twitter was up in arms over how "toxic" HN is with several high profile people "nice people" taking screenshots and implicitly urging people to flag and call people out.

So, that's likely why.

I looked at the comments briefly, then flagged it. The politics of the FSF's decision is relevant and interesting to this community, but that was not what was being discussed, which didn't surprise me at all.

Watch this one disappearing too

It didn't get off quickly.

It's over day old and has 1665 points. HN news gradually get lower in the rank as they get older.

It cracked 2000 comments. Anyone know what the most commented threads of all time on HN are?

I am just waiting for a representative backed by big business to fill the void that RMS left.

Because it's controversial and HN seems to remove/kill such discussions.

I wrote in such a thread and after 4 posts I couldn't post anything for over 3 hours.

It's called deplatforming / cancelling / damnatio memoriae by someone called Selam Jie Gano. Every system of power needs executors.

Ridiculous. HN censoring important news... I guess the best time is over for this site and it's time for something new.