Dang, IIRC, some of these stories had 30-40 votes and no flagging. They were 30 minutes old or less, yet none of them were making it to the home page.
Is that the ranking algorithm? It felt suspicious that these headlines were getting substantial early HN user attention (double digits) but not showing up on the home page.
I know HN isn't a gossip rag, and that we don't tar and feather people, but the story did feel notable.
They did have flagging. The [flagged] marker only appears when flags overwhelm upvotes, but flags affect rank well before that. More about that here: https://qht.co/item?id=38918548.
All of the submissions on this topic are being flagged off the frontpage by users, not moderators.
At the time I came across these threads, none of these submissions were "[flagged]" (or at least not indicated as such in the UI). They had 10-30ish upvotes, all were under an hour old, and yet they were buried on the first and second pages of "new".
Do articles that are flagged once or twice get internally penalized and de-ranked but not shown as "[flagged]" yet in the UI until they accumulate more flagging?
> Do articles that are flagged once or twice get internally penalized and de-ranked but not shown as "[flagged]" yet in the UI until they accumulate more flagging?
"Once or twice" isn't quite accurate but otherwise, yes, that's how it works.
That's not true, and I don't know what you mean by "superusers".