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Ask HN: Why are certain submissions being deleted?

69 points by darxius ↗ HN
I've noticed it a lot in the past couple days.

Specifically, today, several posts involving the firing of Adria were deleted. Even a submission asking about the deletion of the posts was deleted.

Are these just people flagging for no reason?

25 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 65.3 ms ] thread
nedbat
Perhaps people are trying to stop the forest fire from spreading...
mikecane
A free speech shitstorm has erupted. Frankly I want no part of this. But I didn't flag anything. I just avoided reading it.
throwaway125
Someone mentioned the flags are ignored after a post gets 10 upvotes and suggested that maybe the anti spam system is triggered due to the many upvotes in a short period of time.

I think the anti-spam system would not be that quick to react, especially considering some past submissions also have gotten massive amounts of upvotes in a short time (think jslinux or similar).

goodwink
Comments about why the stories are being deleted are also being deleted as are questions posted about why the stories were deleted like this one. It's clear that either someone doesn't want this to be discussed on the site or some sort of technical barried of too many upvotes too fast is going on.
sp332
They should say so so people stop asking.
goodwink
Agreed, if this is manual intervention it should be explicitly announced so that it's both transparent and people stop submitting more links on the same story for them to moderate.
jfim
Sounds like something out of Monty Python.
protomyth
I'm more curious about having a [dead] post on the front page. That seems like something funny with the software.
mikecane
Nah. That's happened before. Once it was a submission I made that I didn't know was junk science, it got a lot of votes, and then was [dead]ed.
petercooper
Deleted? Or just merely pushed way off the front page due to flagging? "Deleted" would be an interesting development here.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
goodwink
Perhaps the more accurate way of describing it is marked "[dead]", although some are not showing up that way either it seems even though you can still follow a direct link to them.
rmrfrmrf
Because anti-woman and anti-black hate groups are trying to game HN with mass account creation and upvote spam.
canttestthis
Newly created accounts cannot flag submissions or downvote comments, so no.
goodwink
I think he was arguing that newly created accounts from those groups were upvoting and the deletion was to counter that. It seems equally far-fetched, but at least not technically impossible. I highly doubt though that the majority of people interested in this story fall into either of those two groups.
evanpierce
No no no, this post is a valid contribution. If you've been following this story closely you'll have noticed that it has leaked past the tech community here at HN and elsewhere, into the gender rights communities, and even into some extremist communities. It has been evoking a lot from a lot of differently interested people. Some eager moderation may be required to handle it appropriately at this point, for everyone's sake.
whatshisface
The link to the Facebook post about how she got fired from sendgrid got removed as well, so it is most likely that people just don't want us to be talking about this.
dkulchenko
Here's all the dead posts (all within the past 30 mins):

20 points - Why are all the posts related to Aria [sic] Richards getting deleted? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5416578

45 points - Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5416514

81 points - Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5416422

48 points - SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5416312

(thanks throwaway125) 148 points (not dead, just shadowed) - SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5416021

obstacle1
The last two links point at the same thread, FYI.
Lewton
"Are these just people flagging for no reason"

I wouldn't say "for no reason". I haven't flagged any, but I can see plenty of reasons why people would. It's basically just tech-drama, and some people don't want to see that on HN.

I'm pretty sure if enough people flag it within a short period of time, it will go dead. This is pure speculation btw, mods might be doing something too

danilocampos
Let me try and take a stab at it.

Hacker News is the most visible organ of one Y Combinator, a technology startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. As an accelerator, YC wants as many opportunities as possible to invest in great companies.

For that reason, they probably do not want to be associated with the insensitivity and occasionally villainous misogyny that has dominated so many of these conversations. Limits their deal flow from everyone who isn't a dude.

Just a hunch.