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The more repetitive a topic gets, the more users flag it. 'Is down' posts are repetitive as a category to begin with, and 'X is down again' posts are repetitive along two axes. There was one of these a few hours ago, before it got flagged:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955595

... which was likely because users regarded it as a quasidupe of

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22935941.

By 'quasidupe' I mean it's not strictly the same story, but the difference ('down again') isn't significant enough for the thread to be substantially different.

(The submitted title on this one was "GitHub: Here We Go Again".)

I understand your argument, but the number of comments on this post shows people still want to discuss it.

Is it possible to run an experiment. Remove the flag option but highlight the hide option to users. Users who are not interested in the topic can remove it from view but do not kill the discussion for those who are interested in it. Then see if the quality of posts/discussions decline.

Every "GitHub is down [again]" post leads to the same discussion. With the number of recent GitHub "service disruptions", it starts to get a bit old.

Agreed.