I'm not sure this is a valid assumption. https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39094387 looks to be a story that dropped to the thirties pretty quickly. Maybe due to other suddenly popular content?
Looking at the 13 stories listed for Monday, January 22, 2024 only 3 seem to have been removed from HN. The other 10 stories still exist.
The HP story, >>39087776 , was likely kicked from the front page due to being a duplicate of >>39060793
The Ford story, https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39089599, seems to be incorrectly detected.
Honestly only 3 or 4 out of 13 look like possible moderation to me. And they don't seem bad. Does a story about razor wire in Texas belong on hacker news? I'm in Texas so the story is of interest to me but I'd expect to hear about it elsewhere, not on HN.
Overall it just makes me think HN is doing a good job at moderation.
If it gets algorithmically deranked for user flags, but but not hidden, is that explicit?
I assume "explicit" means manual moderator intervention, but I don't really see anything that suggests that.
Because there is no visible indication when moderator intervention happens. It doesn't mean it doesn't happen.