Those are two different stories. IMO, the second one is much preferable, as it's an actual story, instead of just a 50-or-so-word G+ and Twitter post. I don't see why it should be considered a duplicate, though I guess if users flagged it, most of them disagreed.
They aren't two different stories by the standards that normally apply on HN. They're about the same thing.
It's true that the SF Weekly article gave more background than the Google+ post, but it was linked in yesterday's thread and the information in it was discussed there.
HN penalizes stories with more comments than votes ("flame war detector"). Between that and the inevitable flagging, stories about sexism and/or workplace harassment tend to die quickly on HN.
Yes, in my experience, this is the most likely reason that this article disappeared.
I have a hard time deciding if this is a good policy or not.
On the one hand, it does tend to mean that there are fewer flamewars showing up on the front page, and getting people sucked into endless debates that go nowhere.
On the other hand, I feel like this works to sweep under the rug real problems that occur in this community. Rather than being able to expose and deal with such problems, once things become contentious they just disappear, leaving only the things that the community has more consensus on.
Although I don't know Kelly Ellis, I believe this is in reference to this: https://plus.google.com/+KellyEllis/posts/L4wawXpNt25 -- I am not actually trying to express an opinion on this, but that's the context from yesterday.
I don't think "complicit culture of silence" is quite right as it implies more direct intent. It's more along the lines of "inability to have a difficult conversation".
My personal stance is that even though this conversation is difficult, it's worth having. If we can't have it, who can?
It was reposted today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9165261. We would normally demote that as a duplicate, but we didn't. Users flagged it.