I don't know what you mean by "manipulated" but these flags were, and are, coming from users, not admins. The most likely explanation isn't sinister—it's that readers were fatigued by the tsunami of stories about this saga, and were flagging the ones that didn't seem to contain significant new information (a.k.a. SNI: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

I realize your perception was that all the negative ones got flagged, but this perception is most likely a function of your own preference (you're more likely to notice it when a story that you agree with gets flagged, because people are more likely to notice what they dislike: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Probably Sam feels like all the positive stories are getting flagged :)

I wrote a longer explanation about how we treat story floods like this from a moderation point of view, if anyone wants to read about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38357788.

Edit: and this applies to the OP, which actually does contain SNI. I've turned user flags off on this submission and changed the title to be the article's HTML doc title, which is more specific.

A large contingent of people here (and anywhere) are prone to hero worship, especially if it tends towards trendy topics like generative AI. The natural reaction to criticism of an idol is to shut it down so you can maintain a singular narrative lest you have to deal with cognitive dissonance.

Which I find ironic, because I’ll see the same people looking down on non technical people idolizing celebrities, but not recognize that it’s the same thing in a different field. The height of Elon worship was identical to Swifties imho.

HN is strongly anti-controversy. So when you have a large enough minority of users who rally around flagging certain topics, they easily get taken down even if there’s otherwise interest in the discussion. I don’t think it requires owner manipulation. You can see it in how things like any coverage of Palestinian perspective getting flagged immediately while coverage of far-right ancap politics lingers despite both being contentious political topics (where ancap discussion is controversial but detractors lack the habitual urge to flag brigade and are more open to discuss).

This website is YCombinator. Sam was with YCombinator

> For no other topic have I seen so many flagged stories, and all of them are the ones that paint Sam in a negative light

This isn't evaluating products for use with pluses and minuses.

Attacks on reputation need to be very, very well substantiated or they are libel (business libel in this case). It's also morally wrong, it leads to the worst kinds of resentful discussions, and frankly, this is not really the place for that if indeed you want justice.

In this case, the board made a decision that broke the reliance of all OpenAI stakeholders on Altman's leadership, with no evidence and little explanation. If OpenAI was transitioned properly and with due care to another CEO, it would have been business as usual.

Some of the rss feed items are being straight up removed rather than just the typical flagged/dead that you normally see - none of them have looked extremely legit to me though.

I've noticed this as well, although empirically.

I don't sympathize with @sama, more so, my personal opinion of him is that he definitely shows off a lot of psychopathic traits, but that said ...

... I'm also ok with keeping those topics outside the scope of this community, which is mainly tech-related and that's what I enjoy about it. Personal affairs belong elsewhere, IMO.

Similar to Elon Musk stories..