Well I'm astounded that you let people "user flag" the story showing the evidence of government intervention in social media "moderation" which until it came out was a rank conspiracy theory. It's deeply controversial and upsetting for large numbers of people who would rather it were not true and I'm one of them. I would definitely rather it if it wasn't true about the suppression of a true story in the lead up to the election. I would definitely rather it wasn't true that the FBI, CIA, NSA etc were getting involved where they really should not. But it is true no matter how much I dislike that it is. It should be discussed widely and nowhere more so than here - it's our industry. How bad is it and how concerned should we be about it is a vital discussion, not be "user flagged" to be out of bounds. I completely understand that a noisy and vocal minority used to think Elon could do no wrong and his farts smelled like lavender and yet we had reasoned, sensible discussion here about his efforts in the Thai cave rescue. Nowadays a noisy and vocal group think Elon is in league with everything that is evil and shout it to the rooftops. Still we are likely to manage.
You didn't say it outright but I would take you at your word you, as in HN didn't moderate the story away and I would like you to confirm in the face of what we now know about pressuring moderators.
If it's "user flags" that did it are you being gamed on that? How do you know?
Would that be happening if it made Trump look like more of a crook than he is which plays to my prejudices just like 90+-ish % of those here? Zeitgeist. Major story that affects us as people, our community, many of our startups and specifically HN, which seems like it would be subject to similar pressures?
The major threads? I never saw them and I come here too often! ;-)
It's also really hard to discuss because the ability of the average user to comprehend nuance seems to have gone down, instead pattern matching things to the nearest cliche. I've seen time and time again what should be a nuanced discussion having users mentally replace nuanced statements and facts with more readily accessible clichés.
I have no simple solutions to that issue, inspiring that kind of nuanced discussion would likely need it to explicitly gamified (e.g. having a specific award/karma that people can give out for someone else understanding the nuance of something someone else said and an equivalent down vote for rounding something off to a cliche) and even that probably wouldnt work.