I know it's no fun, but please try to remember that the overwhelming majority of the time, the explanations for these things are really boring and standard. In this case the thread set off the flamewar detector.
Nah, your "flame war detector" validates it. Am I expected to believe a site that looks a lot like Craigslist and has no extra features like email, favorites, etc. has the ability and competence to properly code a flame war detector?
Or is it more likely there is a basic filter that blocks conversations against the interests of said party? Forums are transparent, when threads are locked /deleted / moderated it is egregiously obvious and publicly visible. HN operates Gestapo style and then tries to gaslight you that nothing happened.
The flamewar detector is just a simple bit of code that looks for threads which have many comments but not so many upvotes. It's far from perfect but it works well enough, especially because it sends us an email each time it demotes a thread, and we review those emails and correct the cases it gets wrong.
More to the point, it's completely neutral with respect to the content of an article or the comments.
Well, they are about to IPO soon so I wouldn't rule out conflict of interests. I saw the link, clicked to read the Reddit post, when I came back, the link is gone. I had to search to find it and it had nearly 300 points. I see no reason to have flagged it since Christain and Apollo have done no wrong. He was telling his users that Reddit is effectively killing Apollo and he was allowed to disclose it.
I know it's no fun, but please try to remember that the overwhelming majority of the time, the explanations for these things are really boring and standard. In this case the thread set off the flamewar detector.