Muse, the band, lost its social media handles to Muse, Meta's new AI agent

That's a good thing, because this is not a good story for HN. It's a riler-upper which attracts attention not because of intellectual curiosity (the desired function of this site) but because it provides a channel for pre-existing indignation.

The story itself lacks SNI (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) - a social media handle rename is not an interesting phenomenon per se. Perhaps if it had been expropriated by Meta there would be something to discuss (maybe! I'm trying to be generous), but despite the usual breathless reporting by clickbait media, my understanding is that there's no evidence that this happened.

In other words, a story like this is a good litmus test for HN; it isn't in keeping with the mandate of the site and therefore doesn't belong on the frontpage, let alone at #1.

Edit: another way to look at this is that we actually did two mod operations in one: (1) merged the threads, and (2) downweighted the story. If the story belonged on the frontpage, we would have done #1 but not #2, using either the trick that you suggested or something similar.

Edit 2: usually when we talk explicitly about this it generates a response like this in some readers: "The mods downweight stories? Egads! How can this place be manipulated in such a fashion?" The short answer is that HN is an actively curated site and always has been. If it weren't, the frontpage would be entirely different. I've posted about this countless times over the years, but statistically there are always quite a few people to whom it is new. Many people are surprised to hear that HN is moderated at all!