The difference with >>40448045 is that the latter story contained Significant New Information (SNI) relative to other recent threads. That's the criterion we apply when deciding whether or not to override penalties (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). It doesn't have to do with who an article is for or against; it has to do with not having the same discussions over and over.
> a manual override [...] might have improved at least the optics
Sure, and we often do that (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), but in this case it didn't cross my mind because the current thread was so obviously derivative of previous discussions that had been on HN's front page for 18+ hours in recent days.
And in any case the next day it flipped back and this story spent 16 hours on the front page:
Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees - >>40447431 - May 2024 (515 comments)
... so I think we're good on "optics". The important point is that the last link (the vox.com article) contained SNI, whereas the slate.com article was a copycat piece piggybacking on other reporting . In the case of a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) like this one, that's the key distinction: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...