"Yanked" suggests human intervention. That's not what happened. It set off the voting ring detector.

Edit: we turned the penalty off.

I wonder in this case whether it was a false positive. Lots of people want to support a project like this and it's fairly natural to email people and tell them that the link has been posted.

The only reason I don't do that any more is that someone told me about the voting ring detector.

Isn't that basically vote ringing?

Communicating about an appealing topic shouldn't be so detrimental.

Every voting ring considers its topic singularly appealing.

This is a hard problem and there are tradeoffs.

It's a Kickstarter about a Django framework that a large amount of the community have a (vested) interest in. So of course this group of people are going to upvote it, just like node stuff gets upvoted by node people, Ruby by Ruby people, etc.

What about allowing users (Maybe only those with more than x000 karma) to downvote links?

I doubt that we'll introduce story downvoting; at least not without a good reason. Users can already flag stories that shouldn't be on the front page.

I wasn't making a statement about human intervention at all. One minute it was doing well on the front page, the next minute it was gone. I noticed that something disappeared/yanked/punted/hid it.

I guess this sort of protection can be helpful, but I hope that it doesn't keep other high quality but less known content out. DRF is popular enough to overcome this false positive, but I wonder if some other lesser-known (but interesting) stuff would be.

Point taken about "yanked".

I share your hope. High-quality, less-known content is exactly what we want more of.