DHH wrote a blog post on Medium that is critical of Uber and YCombinator. The link was posted to Hacker News and received enough upvotes to get to the #2 spot.
The article sharply dropped in position (off the front page) at around the time west coast work day began.
As far as I can tell, nothing in the article violates the 'Hacker News Guidelines'.
Is there an technical explanation of why this would happen related to the algorithm? Has YCombinator offered an explanation of why something like this would happen in the past?
links--
https://medium.com/@dhh/deleting-uber-is-the-least-you-can-do-30c0601103ea
https://twitter.com/dhh/status/833701507585437700
https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/833697426846396416
Those penalties are standard because follow-up posts (e.g. that try to capitalize on hot stories to get cheap attention) and informationless rants routinely get tons of upvotes—many more than the substantive stories that HN is supposed to be for. That's a well-known weakness of the upvoting system. HN can't live by upvotes alone. If we didn't have countervailing mechanisms such as moderation, the site would not survive. I've written about this lots of times, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10292239.
It had nothing to do with San Francisco (the moderator was elsewhere), nor with the rant being about Silicon Valley, etc.; anyone familiar with HN knows that critiques of all those things appear here all the time, and that's fine. We're hoping for thoughtful critique, though, not rage trolling.