Hacker News Stats: 2007–2022 (opens in new tab)

It's a generic Apple documentation page about a story that's had a tremendous amount of HN coverage. As you can see the thread is basically the same as the other threads. Those get moderated as dupes (follow-up dupes, 'quasi dupes' etc). You can search dang's moderation comments about these, it's fairly fundamental to how HN works otherwise specific topics would dominate the front page endlessly and the site would not be interesting. Just in the last couple of weeks:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618673

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39528134

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39388218

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39563618

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39589483

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39643981

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39418412

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39418386

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408196

These are just some of the biggest threads and they have, collectively, several thousand (edit: I added them up - 4831 comments) between them.

Not clear what happened there. Either it was flagged by a couple users (fat fingers on mobile is a problem) or it was the "flamewar detector" gone awry. This "feature" demotes stories when the number of comments exceeds the number of upvotes. Your recourse in this situation is to write dan (hn@ycombinator.com) and ask what happened. Usually if it's an obvious false positive he'll restore it quickly. I wouldn't give up just because of this one.

Edit: HNRankings can sometimes give insight: https://hnrankings.info/39653805/