Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

Question

Maybe it was happening before, but I've noticed it a lot in the last few days - every time there is a thread about Elon Musk, it disappears from the front page extremely quickly, regardless of how many upvotes it has (or the speed of them).I knew Hacker News had built in abilities for their moderators to promote and suppress content, but I am very surprised at the topic/consistency of this suppression in this instance. What gives?

dang · Accepted Answer

It's a combination of user flags, software penalties, and moderation downweights. But there have also been moderation upweights - for example last night we turned off flags on the Twitter-Musk-journalists thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008383) so that it would be on the front page. It ended up being there for 6 hours.
If you want more explanation, I answered a similar question the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992824 - though more in a cri de coeur style.
Btw, none of this is new—it happens every time there's a major ongoing topic with divisive qualities. The principles we use are: (1) downweight the follow-ups so there isn't too much repetition; (2) upweight (not a word - I just mean turn off user flags and software penalties) the ones that have significant new information; and (3) downweight the hopeless flamewars, where the community is incapable of curious conversation and people are just bashing things they hate (or rather, bashing each other in the name of things they hate).
The most important is #3, because it's about preserving the ecosystem. We want HN to live another day. No thread is worth more than that, despite how huge and existential these stories always feel.
If HN were an art house theater, those principles would look like this: (1) don't show the copycat movies; (2) do show the interesting movies; (3) when the theater catches fire, stop the movie and deal with the fire.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

detaro · Answer

I assume people are annoyed by seeing every small iteration of the same overarching story and flag them. A bunch of the stories probably also tripped the flamewar detection, which downranks them automatically.

theCrowing · Answer

Sorry but we don't need to discuss every little shitty thing that happens three times per day just because you missed the thread with hundreds of replies when it was on the frontpage.

fodldl · Answer

Because it's not very interesting. World's richest man misbehaves again on some website he bought? People protest by using an inferior clone of said website? Storm in a teacup. There are much more fascinating things going on in the world than this tedium.If we're going to gauge how thought-provoking a topic is by how wealthy the main character is, might as well flood HN with submissions about what the Kardashians had for breakfast or how often Bill Gates uses the toilet or whatever. It's the same thing as following Musk's car crash behavior.

fragmede · Answer

If you click on "comments" at the top of the page, you'll see that there's plenty of commenting about the particular subject you have in mind.

Jensson · Answer

HN downranks threads with many comments, that is the main thing. Think of each comment as a downvote and it makes more sense why those quickly disappears from the frontpage.

8note · Answer

I'm flagging them at leastIt's entertaining as /r/drama material, but it's not interestingNothing particularly new is added with each thread

Quequau · Answer

I do not believe it is fair to characterise the moderation of stories related to Elon Musk and Twitter as "being suppressed". There are currently dozens upon dozens of submissions about Musk & Twitter, most of which are either low effort, low info, or outright duplicates.Looking at what is being posted and comparing that what is allowed vs removed, it's clear that what is being removed are almost entirely duplicate submissions. This is an entirely reasonable and uncontroversial moderation policy / practice.

Cheiree · Answer

The world does not revolve around Elon Musk.And it says Hacker News in the title, not Twitter/Elon News. In fact if I would not see anything about Elon Musk or Twitter for a week then it would make me supremely happy.

NigelThornberry · Answer

HN is currently being spammed with anti-Musk propaganda, there is one anti-Musk post after another about the same two topics

trasz2 · Answer

HN is owned by YCombinator. They must not annoy their (potential) business partners.

proc0 · Answer

I'm seeing a lot of Musk posts, but they're mostly negative. I'm just saying, I visit dozens of online aggregators, and I've yet to come across one that is "balanced". It's almost impossible at this point. The polarization is real.

monsecchris · Answer

Mods desperately trying to avoid becoming Reddit.The change is inevitable though, the quality and variation of comments are in line with Reddit already.