This page shows which stories have the heaviest penalty applied to their Hacker News rank -- stories that rank lower than they should given their raw HN ranking formula.

Looks like the anti flamewar algorithm is working well. Also, are you sure that flags aren’t contributing?

So, maybe it's a huge conspiracy, or, alternatively, maybe it's a case of a person who attempted to reverse engineer the HN ranking algorithm missing a couple terms in the equation.

Everyone can apply their own form of Occam's Razor. Some will conclude conspiracy, others, missed second and third order terms.