It got upvoted quite quickly, then flagged. The way the algorithm works, if a hot topic is flagged for some time, the story will never show up on the front page.

This was in fact flagged (though no indication on the title) yesterday, approximately 2 hours after it was on the second page.

This seems like it should be on the HN front page.

And yesterday.

Surely it us missing just because many have flagged it. But that's far short of silencing it.

I imagine—but then that is just the HN community silencing it. Maybe flagging should have some different kind of weighting?

I think discussions should be made immune from users flagging them if they have more than a certain amount of comments (50? 100?). If it's a problematic topic, then the administrator(s) should be able to flag it if they deem it necessary.

That would surely suffer the cobra effect.

It is not silenced.