Comment by llm_nerd
1 year ago
I've always assumed that when a story rapidly drops past the first three pages (e.g. >90) it is because it has been flagged some indicative, disproportionate number of times[1] by users with flag functionality. The submission seems to presume that such drops are only the result of Daniel or whoever manually doing it.
Which is true?
[1] - Notably the majority of the "removed" stories have pretty tiny number of upvotes, so if flags are weighted proportionately it wouldn't take many.
Mostly flags, yes, but also software penalties and moderation downweights. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237446.