[was_hellbanned]

This reminds me of a Reddit post from yesterday: http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/2dyi9j/look...

In particular, the bit about the persistent apologies. From the Reddit link:

He's distanced himself from the situation - his nauseating apology texts are dripping with the clueless narcissism that deeply engrained chauvinism is made of: "I know you said not to contact you anymore but I have to apologize so I can get over this... This has turned out almost the exact opposite as I thought it would [sic] and has caused me inexplainable [sic] discomfort .... I just have to come out and say it, I like you."

Also, some of the stories in the comments had similar elements, like:

This exact thing happened to my current gf after she was raped. She just wanted to bury it and he kept pushing his guilt on her for about a year sporadically begging for forgiveness and for her to help him convince himself it wasn't actually rape.

The initial behavior is bad enough, but the continued demand for interaction and forgiveness is entitled and pathetic.

Incidentally, I'm curious as to why I saw this link on the front page of HN from my phone, but when I jumped on the desktop to comment, I was unable to locate it anywhere on at least the first four pages of HN. Now it seems to be back on the second page.

[GuiA]

> Incidentally, I'm curious as to why I saw this link on the front page of HN from my phone, but when I jumped on the desktop to comment, I was unable to locate it anywhere on at least the first four pages of HN. Now it seems to be back on the second page.

Yeah, that's happened to me very consistently over the past few months. I'll see a link on my phone in the first 10 positions, switch to my desktop (where I'm logged in) to comment on it, and it has just disappeared from the front page.

Given the frequency at which I observe this, I suspect the mods do this (maybe programmatically, maybe not) with articles that are likely to be "controversial".

[dang]

> I suspect the mods do this (maybe programmatically, maybe not) with articles that are likely to be "controversial"

We do this (no need to suspect—it's not a secret) but the greater effect comes from user flagging.

Why do we do this? Because hot controversies automatically get upvotes due to being hot and controversial. If there were no countervailing factor, HN's front page would consist of those, plus celebrity stories, trends of the moment, and the like.

The site's mandate is for stories that are intellectually interesting. That's far from the most powerful kind of interesting, so it needs to be protected from the other kinds.

Moderators doing this is not a perfect solution or even a good one, but it works, and has worked this way for years. We're definitely interested in finding a better solution long-term, though. In the meantime, I think most (though not all) of the users flagging stories are doing so responsibly and with the mandate of the site in mind.