HACKER Q&A
📣 montebicyclelo

Why was my submission suddenly removed from the front page?


I'd watched it rise from 20 to 8 (and was still gaining traction), then refreshed it wasn't there any more. Found it had been bumped to page 2, with no explanation.

The post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32917888


  👤 metadat Accepted Answer ✓
It's kind of a stupid and shallow article, so probably people flagged it. Or Dang / the @Dang Algorithm de-ranked it.

Whenever an article doesn't meet HN's [boring] guidelines [0], some of the account holders aggressively flag it. This is a good thing on average, because otherwise HN would be shitty in all the same ways as Reddit. At least this way, ze haq0rnewz gets to be shitty in a different way: due to lack of gossip and adolescent humor.

The same thing happened to a submission of mine just yesterday with the Beyond Meat Facebiting COO [1]. They don't always get publicly marked as "flagged", though. Sometimes they just drop way far back from FP.

In the end, what does it matter? No one person should control what appears on the front page or not, and HN points are truly one of the most worthless forms of currency I can think of. Be grateful some people enjoyed it before it got murdered! I'm sure you made their day a bit brighter.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905810