I switched into writing Markdown by accident. We've got the site frontend running on jekyll so it's static and easy to scale, and I've gotten too used to using the syntax.
Sorry, our bad. Fixing that now, should be done in a few minutes. That's our GeoIP server not returning a value, and our javascript freaking out as a result.
This project was originally suggested by David Segal, Aaron's co-founder at Demand Progress, back in November. We'd been waiting for the right date to actually build and launch it, and David suggested that using Aaron's passing was likely the best marker, particularly since he and Brian Knappenberger had just uncovered some footage of Aaron talking about the need for a "moment of activism" around state surveillance (which'll be released soon). I can definitely understand the skepticism, but from my understanding it was definitely an issue he cared about.
Interestingly, this post appears to have been flagged or relegated in some way. It has 141 points in one hour at 10th place, while the Steam Family Sharing post has 150 points in first place and is two hours old.
Certainly some of the discussion on other threads should be filtered. But the moderation on stories themselves appears to be heavy-handed right now. Many significant new stories aren't making it to the home page (see above).
A proposed solution: If the reason for this in fact flagging, and not moderation by admins, then perhaps showing the guidelines and possibly requiring users to give a reason for flagging might reduce the number of wayward flags.
The official guidelines for flagging are: "If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link"