[dang]

Such suspicions will be evergreen (everblack?) for as long as HN exists but no, we don't moderate HN that way. Lots of past explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

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.

[WhatWorkingOn]

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.

[dang]

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.