Not flagged, but that domain is downweighted, as are most major media/web sites on HN. The downweight is pretty carefully calibrated to allow the (hopefully) most interesting (or at least most upvoted) articles through, but then we get these weird outliers that stay underwater.

I'm not so worried about a major news piece (someone else will just repost a different version of the story, as happened here), but sometimes there are really cool and interesting posts that get lots of upvotes and even comments without ever reaching escape velocity.

It's a bit Rube Goldbergian but my thought is to have separate software watching for those, and maybe plugging them into the second-chance pool or something (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).

You're replying to the (as far as I know) solo mod of HN. I suspect he knows about the active view ;) though that's new info to me.

Wonder why that's isn't in the nav - to cool down active discussions?

I basically do the same. My primary interface is https://www.hckrnews.com which shows active/popular stories in chronological order. Makes it much easier and faster to tell what I've already seen.

That's no problem! Lots of people probably don't know about it. But it would be good to link to https://news.ycombinator.com/lists (also linked in the footer of every HN page) since there are other obscure things there too.