This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. See "How are stories ranked?" and "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?"
About this specific case: it set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector) and also got moderation downweights. We sometimes turn off that penalty, but I don't think we'd do so in a case like this, because HN gets so many posts of this nature. They flare up with Big Drama that is sensational for a while but not particularly interesting, and therefore not really what the site is for.
In fact HN gets so many posts of this type that it has become a joke, and not only that but a cliché, so much so that the top comment of the Reddit thread repeats it [1]. That's about as repetitive as anything gets. The basic idea of HN is to gratify intellectual curiosity [2] and avoid repetition [3].
I read this whole thread before the CEO posted and after, and neither time thought any of the comments were out of line or even that the general mood was any more heated than any other random HN thread. People are politely asking pertinent questions.
And I think once the CEO makes a statement which contradicts the company's support response, that becomes very interesting. Particularly to anybody that uses their service. I'm certainly not finding the conversation very repetetive or cliche.
You're welcome to disagree, of course. My main concern is to explain what the principles are. I'm not saying we apply them perfectly—sometimes we make bad calls.
I can tell you pretty much for certain though, that we'd hear many more complaints if a Reddit thread about a customer support shitstorm stayed on HN's front page for very long.
Btw, the Customer Support Fuckup category is one of several $X where HN has become known as the place for $X, but only because HN is not actually for $X. Another example is the Site Is Down category—people often come to HN to find out what's going on when some $Site or other is having an outage. But just as HN itself isn't a site monitoring platform, it's also not a customer-support-of-last-resort platform.
If the community feels like this customer support fuckup is altogether more interesting, I'd consider reversing the call, but again, my gut feeling is that we'd get even more complaints that way.
I agree completely with the underlying principles, I just think once the CEO has commented and stirred up some interesting discussion that's relevant to a large segment of your userbase, the thread doesn't really belong to some generic "customer service shitstorms" category anymore.
I learnt more about Netlify, Vercel etc and how they operate from this thread from the last 100 "customer service" threads combined. I learned about Cloudflare's offerings, and a bit about Hetzner. And it was all very interesting.
You said you sometimes turn off those penalties, I think this thread would be a good candidate.
Something that makes me feel uneasy about the fact that the post gets hidden is that this strongly benefits Netlify. It seemed like lots of people moved off Netlify after reading the post.
I'm not suggesting that HN actively took an action in Netlify's favor, but the potential is there. Is the algorithm for flame war detection open source? Or do we essentially need to trust you that there was no interference from Netlify? (I do trust you but others might not).
We didn't have any private contact with anyone about this post other than a couple users emailing to ask why it wasn't on the front page anymore. Nor were we thinking about who would or wouldn't benefit—that never crossed my mind. I was just thinking about standard HN moderation practice.
I don't know how to get every user to trust us. All we can do is answer questions when asked. That seems to be enough to satisfy most of the community most of the time, and it's probably not possible to do a lot better than that, much as I would like to.
I'm not a fan of opaque ranking algorithms either. Just use this, the only thing it has is a 500 point threshhold and surprise, that works perfectly fine to determine what is currently trending in the community