[tnone]

This is a long standing pattern. Whenever a thread about a social justice topic gets too far away from the orthodoxy, it gets flagged and hidden. In some cases I've seen a thread without any noticable flags and with a high score nevertheless drop hundreds of places so it sits between week old content. The official response to the LambdaConf controversy was the most glaring example.

At this point the HN moderators are either incompetently letting the system get gamed for obvious political purposes by one particular camp, or they are quietly looking the other way when it goes down. Either way, it's a pretty open secret by now.