I don't know understand why its going down? The downvotes should be displayed separately and should not affect the upvotes, unless the upvotes are getting deleted (by somebody or by the upvoters themselves)
You can cause the same thing to happen to any comment by rapidly clicking the upvote button. This seems to cause the upvote count to drift upward, even though you would expect it to just oscillate between two values. I've just taken parkermoseyondown's comment from 0 to 40 upvotes.
Edit: This seems to be a UI issue. After reloading his comment is sitting at only 1 upvote.
Hrm, I'll be fascinated to know whether there's a COS employee of the Atlantic or whether they give moderator accounts to their advertisers, HuffPo-style.
"Collusion" seems like overstating the case a little to me. I'd be more shocked if the opposite were true -- if the site publisher wanted to remove a comment, and Disqus, for whatever reason, wouldn't let them. Disqus isn't supposed to be making editorial decisions on their customers' sites; if someone wants to be an idiot and moderate out non-cheerleading comments, it's not Disqus' place to override that decision.
I suppose you could come up with a theory where The Atlantic talked/bribed Disqus into doing the moderation for them, but it seems much more straightforward to assume that it's the admins at The Atlantic who were filtering comments.
By they, I mean the Atlantic, not Disqus. Though, it wouldn't surprise me if they had contract moderator options available for companies who don't want to employ their own.
Yes ... I appreciated that one too. I'm sure they're monitoring HN since this place is such a bastion of scientists, so it might be disappearing shortly.
interesting, could this be his Disqus employee "privileges" allowing his comment to bypass moderation and if so, how does that bode for websites using Disqus? They control the discussion unless someone at Disqus wants to talk? Although ~~from what I can tell it's a free service, so they can't do much damage by leaving.~~ nevermind, there is a disqus premium service.
That was never a good idea IMHO... If you care about your readers, don't outsource comments. I cannot take websites seriously that are using Disqus (or Facebook, or other such shady, inaccountable stuff) to replace such a vital part of their online operations.
This is the weirdest thing I've ever read on the Atlantic. You're actually letting the Church of Scientology sponsor content on your website?