I edited my post to include the link, I guess if people see these posts I'm not completely banned and maybe there isn't anything nefarious going on, they have a situation where the comments to a single comment are already off the first page so there could be a software bug. But it does appear that there is some sort of reputation management going on.
Ah thanks, I guess it's been moved to it's own top level comment - I did check but only checked until page 4. It's weird because this chain of comments which is otherwise off topic and doesn't have anywhere near the points (2 (edit now 0) vs 37) and has same parent is on the first page. So I'm not sure if that was the right remedy. Hackernews needs better tooling for this or at least let me know if something has moved to try to flatten out the tree.
