Ok, I'm finally getting to this - sorry for taking so long! First let's find the actual HN submissions... here they are:

Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39089599 - Jan 2024 (78 comments)

Secret Plan Against Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39092116 - Jan 2024 (5 comments)

Show HN: Vx.dev – GitHub-Powered AI for effortless development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39091819 - Jan 2024 (34 comments)

Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387 - Jan 2024 (68 comments)

Of those 4, the Ford one and the open-source builds one set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector); the Germany one was flagged; and the Show HN one got moderated down. Let's look at what happened in that order.

The Ford one setting off the flamewar/overheated detector is easy to understand: hatred for modern car UIs is one of the most popular topics on HN these days and always gets people going (me too! but never mind)...which no doubt is one reason why the media sites keep playing it up. We wouldn't turn the penalty off in such a case. The discussion might not have been a flamewar but it was nearly entirely generic - for example the top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090622. Given how over-discussed this topic already is, I'd say this is a case of HN's software working as intended.

The open-source one setting off the flamewar/overheated detector is also unsurprising as open source stuff is also highly discussed and also gets people going. In this case I could make a case for turning off the penalty, but in the end would probably decide against it, because the article isn't very deep, the discussion is rather generic, HN has a surplus of such discussion already, and nothing here really clears the quality bar. But it's more of a borderline call; I can see how others could interpret it differently.

"Secret plan against Germany" was flagged by users. That's a political story with a baity title, so the default would be for it to get flagged. We sometimes turn flags off on such stories but I don't know that this one clears the bar. It's more current-events than deeply-interesting, the ideological material is inflammatory and nobody is going to approach it with curiosity. The thread was already showing clear signs of turning into a flamewar. Even then, we might still turn off the flags, but only if the story were intrinsically of great significance—the sort of thing it just wouldn't make sense not to discuss at all. I doubt this clears that bar.

The Show HN, we moderated down because "star for free trial" is not a valid thing to do in a Show HN and is something the community here would strongly oppose (see the top comment). Here's what I emailed the submitter: "We downweighted the post after getting complaints from users. 'Star repo for free trial' is way too much of a hard sales tactic for HN, and even more so for Show HN, which implies that users can try out the product (see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). Asking them to star your repo first may be an ok tactic in other communities, but in the HN context it comes across as manipulative and is not in your interest at all."

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I guess the summary here is that this list is a mix of clear calls and borderline calls, but defensible ones. Anyone is free to disagree of course! No two readers, including mods, would ever make all the same calls. But if you do disagree, please keep two things in mind:

(1) You have to take each decision in larger context. A perfectly good story can be a bad fit for HN's front page if, for example, the story has already had a lot of discussion; and

(2) If we moderated cases like the above ones differently, the consequence would be letting a lot more stories onto the front page that are more repetitive and/or sensational than the median front page story is today. I doubt that most readers would want that. You can't think of this in terms of isolated submissions or topics; there would need to be some principle by which the decisions would be made differently. HN's mandate is intellectual curiosity. If there's a way to serve that better, I'd certainly like to know what it is; but given the mandate, that's the only kind of change it would make sense to implement.