House Opens Inquiry into Proposed U.S. Nuclear Venture in Saudi Arabia
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
If you don't want it on the front page, flag it. If you do, upvote it. That's how HN works. Enough people flag it, it will fall off. If enough upvote, it will stay there. Either way, that's what people on HN wanted.
To clarify: As far as I'm aware flags are not for personal preferences but for flagging stuff that definitely don't belong here: pure clickbait, spam, flat earth advocacy (if not in a context where it is interesting) etc.
If people belive flagging is the right thing to do for anything they personally don't want on the front page that could explain why some very interesting posts went off the front page despite multiple upvotes and healthy discussion :-/
Edit: based on my experience here (this is not my first HN account) it seems flags weighs a whole lot more than upvotes, so if people use flags on articles like they'd use a downvote then a few user can easily push away a story that many of us found really interesting.
Also, I might have misunderstood your intention, in which case I apologize for that and leave the comment here as it wouldn't surprise me at all if a number of others misunderstood as well.
Just upvote the submissions you want on the front page if you want to keep them there. In your personal opinion, the post does belong on the front page. That's your right. Which is also my point.
There's no need to get mad at each other for flagging or upvoting. We're all choosing to be a part of a community. And I think the current system efficiently manifests consensus in that community.
If you don't like the consensus view in many cases? Well, I mean, I don't really know what I can tell you?
I can live fine with the consesus. Or leave. My point was that sometimes important or interesting stuff (in my and many others, as proven by our upvotes) posts vanish.
And if that happens not because it broke the rules and not because it was replaced by other more upvoted stories but rather because a small subset of users abused the flag button as a super-downvote that is not what I would call consensus.
If all HNers went on to abuse flags to get rid of everything we either didn't like or found offensive then there would be a much smaller selection of topics here.
Personally I almost never flag any post that has made it past /newest and I personally think that is how it is supposed to be.
But try to understand, it only takes a "small subset" of millions of HN users to get a post past /newest to the front page in the first place. We can't start complaining that it only takes a "small subset" of millions of HN users to remove it.
It might even be the case that the fact that it only takes a small subset of users to move a post to the front page is precisely the reason that the people behind HN implemented a flagging mechanism. So that, for instance, a small subset of people can't force dozens of their articles about the superiority of Emacs onto everyone else for days at a time. Worse, it encourages someone like me to post articles on the superiority of vi. (That's different though, because I'm only correcting the misinformation.)