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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902355 also disappeared from the front page very suddenly earlier. This also gave me the impression there's either more active moderation of a certain class of stories atm, or the audience is flagging them a fair bit.
Nah this happens a lot on HN, every so often I see something interesting on mobile, and go to reply on desktop maybe 10, 20 minutes later and I just can't find the link anymore at all without directly typing the id from mobile into the address bar, shit just disappears entirely on a regular basis. Not even flagged, deleted, or anything obviously wrong with the post at all, they just get silently delisted.
Never saw that before.