Does HN censor some topics by removing them from the list of posts?

Question

Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626321It was rising at the time with a lot of discussion before it disappeared from the list of posts.I cannot see it on any page. The only way to access it is via a direct link or the search:https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=false&query=instagram&sort=byPopularity&type=storybut now I guess they'll remove it from there too. Why?

muzani · Accepted Answer

From the guidelines:"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."The thing is that this "sex vs free speech" topic has been going on for a long time. There are plenty of other sites to discuss it.It is also the kind of thing that people would be unnaturally attracted to, and yet is low quality content - it has sex, and also seems to be about challenging human rights.I think it's good that this kind of thing is buried quickly, because more news of this type are not very interesting.

Firerouge · Answer

I noticed this too, it vanished from New Posts right after I viewed it, thought it was deleted until you posted this...

gus_massa · Answer

HN has a penalty for post with more comments than upvotes. I guess it was the main cause of the drop in the rank of that post.

SamReidHughes · Answer

If you want a good website, you need good users, and if you want good users, you have to limit content that attracts bad users.