No, HN has worked this way since long before dang was running it; I believe pg implemented the feature. It's a good feature, in that it tends to bury threads that bring much more heat than light.
No, the presence of the function is not evidence that something is due to that function or the absence of other functions. Many people blindly believe only the speculations that support them and it is unfortunate that much easy confirmation bias believing this misunderstanding has also been observed here due to my not explaining it right away.
