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Comment by iainmerrick | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this should have been flagged -- it's tackling a controversial issue, sure, but in a well-reasoned and non-inflammatory way. It seems similar in topic to a lot of articles that were showing up here before the election. I'm not sure whether the plan is just to flag all political opinion pieces now so we can get back to talking about tech. It seems like it would be better just to let the community decide.

I definitely don't want to start a "flagging this article is censorship!!" flamewar, I'm just curious about the rationale. And even though I've been posting here for a while I'm still relatively new and don't know all the rules and conventions. This is the first flagged article that I found interesting and worthwhile. (In fact I read the article, then went back to read the comments here, and had trouble finding it again because it was flagged!)

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> It seems like it would be better just to let the community decide.

That's what's happening. Users flagged this story, moderators haven't touched it. My comment just says why I think the user flags were correct.

Edit: btw, on HN the term "flag" and the "[flagged]" marker always indicate community action: users clicking on links that say 'flag'. Moderators do other things, some of which are visible and some not, but we didn't do anything here. We never use the word 'flag' to describe a moderator action (we might say 'penalize' or 'downweight' instead). On HN you can think of 'flag' as a semi-technical term with a precise definition.

Thanks for the explanation!

> It seems like it would be better just to let the community decide.

That's what's happening.

Discouraging discussion of this story may be the best for HN, but it doesn't seem fair to call this a 'community decision' unless the number of flags is comparable to the number of upvotes. If it's not, once the moderators have noticed the flagging, it seems fair to say that the moderators have made a decision that the minority should prevail. Again, this isn't necessarily a bad decision, but once you've reviewed it I think you should own it as informed editorial moderation.

On HN you can think of 'flag' as a semi-technical term with a precise definition.

Sometimes articles are marked as both [flagged] and [dead]. What's the difference in status between the two? I thought flagged meant the article was moved down the list, but I didn't find this one present even when following 'More' to the end. Is 'vouching' something that is possible only on [dead] articles? Does it make sense to view 'vouch' and 'flag' as counteracting each other? Even if it doesn't make the article visible again, it might be nice if it was possible to register a 'no-flag' dissent.

Re first para: As long as people don't think [flagged] means moderators applied special powers to demote a story, your description is fine with me.

Re second para: User flags make a post drop in rank and, beyond a certain threshold kill the post as well (unless it has many comments). [flagged] means there are lots of flags. [dead] means the post was killed. A [dead] a.k.a. killed post is closed to new comments and is visible only to users who have 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile. Flags are one way for a post to become dead, but there are others, such as the site being banned. Moderators typically don't kill posts, unless we're banning a user or a site. Vouches are anti-flags but only exist when a post is [dead]; their purpose is to counteract any flags that are making the post be [dead]. You're right that we could have 'vouch' show up even if an article is merely [flagged] rather than [dead]. I'd have to think a bit about that. Have I answered your questions? :)

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