"Offended the moderator" silent topic suppression

[gjsman]

Patently obvious suppression of submissions that, although they gain interest and are from generally reputable sources, are blocked from getting too high a rank.

Note that said article:

• Is from an acceptable, respected source
• Has 5 comments (later 9), not possible to set off flame war detection (almost all of them constructive, multiple paragraphs)
• Is not flagged, and has no visible moderator activity
• Ranks with articles with almost no upvotes from same time period, and close observation suggests it is blocked from ranking higher than 60 in rank
• Potential accusations about "preventing a flamewar" are also disingenuous, as they permitted a 2,924-comment mega topic from the Washington Post when it came to banning COVID-19 misinformation. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693060)

[gjsman]

Resolved, in an email exchange with dang:

Your last point was mistaken. The article was flagged by users. The [flagged] marker only shows up once user flags are sufficient to kill the thread, but user flags have a downranking effect before that. 

Mods did not touch your submission.

I've turned off the flags and rolled back the clock on the thread now.

Daniel (moderator)

I suppose this is on the undocumented features list, but it wasn't obvious from a read-through that was happening.