Comment by ddevault

>HN’s anti-voting-ring software is now so strict that the main thing we have to do is turn it off when a submission is good enough

A chilling effect of this can be that moderators have a much more direct hand in choosing what kinds of content is successful if their criteria for "good enough" is not the same thing as "was not actually a vote ring". There are a few other sources of bias introduced by the human/automation moderation relationship.

Another issue is that HN's flagging system is routinely abused by small groups of users to remove content which does not actually run afoul of the guidelines. It's effectively a super downvote: it removes content entirely, works for posts and comments, has a much lower minimum karma threshold, and it's very hard to rescue a flagged post, and you can't "vouch" before a post gets flagged - only after.