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I haven't read that article but those bits you've quoted strike me as mad, and certainly have nothing to do with how we run Hacker News.

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To be honest, it's such a long article I couldn't find a good passage that summarizes it, so I went for the most stark bit. Because it's really quite mad.

But it wasn't my intent to claim you run HN like this either way; but I'm making the educated guess that people who think the above isn't mad, but quite exciting, would be both likely to use this site, and prone to abuse flagging to suppress discussion, and/or awareness of the article that would be discussed.

Ah I see, and yes that's a mistake I make rather often (assuming that a comment is about moderation when it's actually about the community). But tbh I don't have this impression of the HN community. I don't think we have that many users who feel that way, and certainly we have many more users who would strongly disagree.

I don't know what "many" would be here, but it's obviously too many, since the flagging of these topics is really constant. And that flags are used by people because they are "annoyed by" or "don't care" about these things is stated by people all the time, who never followed up when I challenge them. So that doesn't give me the impression of good faith. If the reasons are benign and not to suppress awareness and discussion -- in short, not people thinking themselves the lords of others -- then nobody would have a problem with people opting out with something like "ignore thread flags" option.

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