It's apparently lower than "I made a raycaster in 256 bytes" and higher than "I got banned from Stack Exchange for not supporting Israel". I can't really tell where the bar is.
HN post rank != importance or interest, rather something more akin to "discussion quality + recency". A highly polarizing post with lots of comments vs votes or lots of flags will tend to rank lower than a neutral post with mild votes and mild discussion via the algorithm. A lot of that depends on the presentation, if the post presents something more controversial it still tends to float to the top as long as it is thoughtful instead of inciteful.
I can't see where the original post links to, but if what the commenter said is true, you got banned not for "not supporting Israel" but instead for "supporting the slaughter of 200 teenagers".
Well, yes. That's how this works. In politics, nobody ever says they are punishing you for $obviously_insane_thing_to_punish_someone_for - they make a more plausible excuse to accuse you of. That woman arrested in Russia for holding a blank sign wasn't arrested for holding a blank sign - she was arrested for attempting to destroy Russia or something like that.
But this is too far off-topic. The point is, that was evidently below the bar of what's allowed on Hacker News even though I'd think as many people would have wanted to know what's going on on SE, as want to see a cool raycaster.
Can you share a link to it in one of your comments or your profile?
I mean, don't know if your post was an external link where you explained the issue, or if the explanation was directly embedded in HN, but currently I don't know what SE is retaliating for, and I'd like to be able to know
PS: Nevermind, I noticed I can enable "showdead" in the HN settings.
Doing so still keeps the URL hidden, but at least it reveals that the flagged post was pointing at immibis.com , so you can find the context there. (It seems to be the post from 2024 May 7th)
This is mildly interesting, and maybe important for a few people. That's enough.