Bizarre. I also saw this. The thread went from nothing to [flagged][dead] over the course of about a minute without going through an intermediary [flagged] phase. Fortunately, it's vouched back to life for the time being.
Yesterday, I posted an "Ask HN" on the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42892245
I wonder if there's some sort of coordinated flagging of Musk-related topics going on, especially given Musk's ongoing (and possibly illegal) government interference. The fact that the flags seem to come so rapidly (enough to mark [dead] within ~30s) is suspicious to me. Can dang comment on this?
Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens all the time, you just happened to notice this one. It's not only Musk-related posts, either. Negative submissions about Altman also get flagged and disappeared. The mods don't seem very interested in countering this behavior. Often it's weakly supported by claiming the discussion is low quality. (Which is often true, but not imho a good enough reason to suppress the topic rather than enforcing comment guidelines.)
Flags and vouching come more from the user base than from dang who more often trails in late.
There are very strong pro and anti Musk camps on HN, evidenced in any Musk related thread. These are not necc. large populations but they are quite active.
> I wonder if there's some sort of coordinated flagging of Musk-related topics going on
my impression as well
> Can dang comment on this?
LOL! The naivete...