> There are also a few articles that are thinly veiled affiliate spam. For example, the ShelfJoy links about books that Aaron Swartz and David Bowie loved fall into this category. They get called out in the comments for being very low-effort lists of Amazon affiliate links.
OP uses this story as an example of having "moderator fingerprints on them" i.e moderators censoring posts, which is not true. What happened was the opposite : the moderator uncensored a post flagged by the community.
Well, the author tried to account for that by saying that normal flagged posts don't go down near as fast.
If what is being said in other threads is true, high karma accounts clicking flag could push a post off the front page without showing the "flagged" tag, then that could be an explanation instead. Which would then mean that maybe these high karma users have too much power.
Especially when it's a bit too easy to flag an article by mistake due to progressive rendering causing a misclick, or just being careless. I know I've done it, noticed, and then gone back to unflag. I wonder how often I've clicked off by a few pixels and didn't notice.
That's an interesting point. I hadn't even considered the possibility that a single user would have the power to drop a story by hundreds of positions. If that's the case then those users do have a lot of power.
> There are also a few articles that are thinly veiled affiliate spam. For example, the ShelfJoy links about books that Aaron Swartz and David Bowie loved fall into this category. They get called out in the comments for being very low-effort lists of Amazon affiliate links.