8 of the current top 10 stories have been on the front page for longer than the submission that is critical of ycombinator and every single one of them has vastly fewer upvotes and comments. It's not even close, the story that is currently in position 6 has 1/4th the upvotes and 1/10th the comments. It has been on the front page since its submission.
It is impossible for the velocity, given any reasonable common sense examination, for the upvotes on that post to be greater than the story that was nuked after 2 hours.
There is no submission on the front page, some of which have been on the front page for over 24 hours, that has more upvotes, comments, or any conceivable rate of upvoting or commenting that even approaches 1/10th of the nuked story.
There is one submission that has an average of four upvotes per hour.
Assuming that upvotes fall off precipitously after leaving the front page, which I would say is a safe assumption, the nuked story had an upvote rate of several hundred per hour.
There's something fishy going on and that smell isn't the strong odor given off by Salt Water Dimmers, a submission to a barren wikipedia page about an obsolete technology with 13 upvotes and 5 comments that debuted on the front page, and has been there for several hours.
I'm not joking. On the front page of HN for several hours is a link to a 200-word wikipedia article about dimmers used in stage productions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687950
For what it's worth, stories about Boom (a ycombinator joint) SEEM to get nuked extremely rapidly when non-VC non-techbro domain experts start chiming in about what their chances for success actually are and how there's a 50% chance they're the next OceanGate and a 50% chance they're just a scam that got way too big for its britches.
I understand that articles don’t just climb due to the magnitude of upvotes, but also the velocity or upvote rate.
All kinds of articles don’t stick to the top, to me the more likely explanation is that the rate of upvotes was not sustained.