It's more a question of the article. What we're looking for includes: is the article not too repetitive of recent discussions? does it contain significant new information? is there a reasonable chance that it could support a substantive, thoughtful discussion, or is it too flamebaity/provocative? that kind of thing.
Can you tell if there's a concerted effort to flag Musk and DOGE related threads? I've seen threads go from nothing to [flagged][dead] in the course of 30 seconds after being up for 40 minutes, suggesting very spiky flagging behavior. This has come up a few times recently, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904148
(Of course, I could just be misunderstanding how flagging works on the site... maybe the state machine has to transition in order from regular -> [flagged][dead] -> [flagged] after vouching?)
I haven't looked specifically at DOGE stories but from my general perspective, this is the same as what we see with all the hottest/most divisive topics—that is, it's the same with Musk in general, Trump in general, and Israel/Gaza, to name perhaps the 3 most in-that-category topics.
