Hey mods is there a particular reason this post is being penalized? As of writing it's #22 with 400 points in 1 hour, while #5 has 119 points in 3 hours.
replies(3):
All three elements—moderators, users, software—comprise HN's moderation system. The system works this way because if it didn't, the front page would be dominated by politics and flamewars, which can't coexist with HN's organizing value of intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
That doesn't mean that all political topics are excluded here, as anyone who pays attention to HN is aware. The main things we're looking for are whether there's overlap with intellectual curiosity, and whether the topic is one that hasn't been discussed recently. Those two criteria tend to support curious conversation.
In this case, the topic has been heavily discussed in recent months—indeed it's one of the most-discussed topics on HN at present and there has been a huge number of flamewars about it—so we would tend toward downweighting the thread. On the other hand, the discussion on this one has managed to stay relatively thoughtful—far from perfect, but we didn't get a wretched flamewar, which is unusual with so provocative a post, especially on a nationalistic topic, which is probably the most inflammatory of all domains these days. So I've reduced the downweight.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...