I didnt flag the article, but anecdotally, I was initially unable to load the article at all. It mentions how it ended up in an adblock list. The article makes it sound like this is a good thing, as it stops the DDOS, but it isn't preventing people from loading the page directly. That may be true for people using an adblocking extension, but my adblocking DNS seems to be blocking it based on that same list. I had to manually tweak my dns-based adblocker to allow the domain in order to read the article.

I looked at the flags and they seem to be legit flags from legit users. My guess is that they thought this was below-the-radar drama that wasn't on topic for HN. (I could make a "people who flagged X also flagged" list a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771900 to support the point, but it's a time-consuming pain so I'd rather not!)

Edit: after looking at this more closely, I have a counterintuitive (to me at least) take: I think this is interesting enough to transcend the usual categories. That is, we'd normally downweight this kind of post off the frontpage - but in this case there are so many unusual variables that the usual rules don't apply.

I say this despite having zero clue what's going on here. We do have a nose for what the HN community might find interesting (we'd bloody well better after doing this job for so long), so let's override the flags and see what happens.

But without relitigating WWII please.

This is definitely interesting and HN-worthy. If nothing else, archive.today links are posted on tons of HN submissions, so it's topical.

I agree - it's clear that archive.is / archive.ph / archive.today / who-knows-what-else has been a lubricant in many HN threads, letting people read things they otherwise couldn't, and that increases the interest of the topic.

I suppose I should add that we prefer archive.org links when they're available, but often they aren't.

Edit: I suppose I should also re-add that we have no knowledge of or opinion about what's going on in the dispute at hand.

> we prefer archive.org links when they're available

Interesting. May we know why?

Archive.org is run by a registered nonprofit instead of what’s likely a sole maintainer, who while I personally appreciate, does seem to go a little unhinged sometimes (like the dispute with Cloudflare DNS).

I assume that answer is not official, since there's nothing more unhinged than archive.org facilitating the page's originator to make alterations after the snapshot.

This also makes it susceptible to government pressure. It's easy to get a page taken down from archive.org and it won't archive anything paywalled.

Government pressure is the least of the problem. Anyone gaining control of a domain can delete all archives of it.

Because the government pressures them to obey this

Perhaps because the admins of archive.org don't go around DDoSing random blogs I'd reckon.

Instead they execute source page JS and allow it to doctor the archive copy.