[sologrrl]

Yes, that came out in a thread where people were complaining that many positive/neutral posts about Microsoft/Nokia were being downranked and disappeared from the front page, while negative stories didn't usually have that problem leading to a chilling effect on the stories submitted and commented on. People seem to have got riled up over it because they thought it was being flagged, but PG said it was because of the flamewar detector that penalizes articles with lots of comments but fewer upvotes, atleast in that particular case.

The flamewar detector does its intended job with things like the gender discrimination stories but it looks like it throws out the baby with the bathwater and contributes to the echo chamber effect.

Here's a couple of Samsung stories that met the same fate. http://hnweird.tumblr.com/

It's really hard to tell(except if you're pg or HN staff) whether a story disappeared because of the flamewar detector, or flagging or the domain greylist or something else. I guess this is intentionally so.