[waterlesscloud]

There's a few factors other than vote totals and submission age at play, any/all of which could skew the results a fair amount.

1- Some source sites are penalized heavily. Sites with a history of low quality articles have built in negative modifiers (ie Gawker)

2- Posts with more comments than upvotes are penalized, on the theory that someone is flame warring in the comments. This actually seems to work out more accurately than you'd expect.

3- Flagging, which you don't see as a visible indicator until a story is dead. However, there's some threshhold beneath which it affects a story's ranking, but it hasn't yet killed the story.

And the mods sometimes manually tinker with stories they feel are / are not what they want on the site.

[reitanqild]

> on the theory that someone is flame warring in the comments.

... one mans flamewar seems to be another mans: it takes a few tries to explain this.

I'm find HN is very civilized. On other forums I see people talking about nuking entire counties, calling each other names etc all while posting under a full, real life names.

The thing that bugs me at HN (except interesting content disappearing like this post describes) is anonymous downvotes, - and mostly not because they hit me (usually they don't do : ) but because so often they are so obviously a result of political correctness and groupthink that it hurts.