The article itself was a bit disappointing because it focused on political issues. In my opinion the strength of HN in this regard is that it is both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right", as evidenced by the fact that a comment on a controversial topic can easily float near zero points while raking in both upvotes and downvotes. And even those who refer to it as "the orange site" still come back and comment. In other words, HN may be an echo chamber but it is a pretty big one with a lot of voices in it.
I definitely want to give credit to dang and sctb for making it that way. It could have gone differently. In particular, the no-politics argument is basically a fancy way of saying "nothing that challenges the status quo please". [1] I really appreciate them trying to keep the forum in a state where these discussion can at least happen. I would have left long ago if flagging had continued to be used to kill topics.
[1] See, e.g., Prof Ichikawa on how skepticism gets misused to defend the status quo: https://twitter.com/jichikawa/status/1134323822096658433
Flagging is frequently used to kill topics still. Climate change articles are still flagged mercilessly, before any discussion starts and without regard for the high-quality of the articles.
dang as a moderator has specifically said that articles about Russia hacking elections are penalized prior to any votes or comments starting (edit: I believe this particular issue is done by the 'moderators' themselves manually or through a filter, not through user-flags. they are not just moderating discussion, they are filtering which topics you see in the first place, on their own).
The discussion here is framed by people who do not want to talk about certain interesting Hacker and Startup related issues, like global climate change or the stability of democracy with technology.
Flags are a common tool used by the community here to shape the discussion before it starts, hiding topics entirely from view that the community would otherwise vote and discuss.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...
Any topic this widespread is going to produce many copycat and follow-up articles that add no significant new information, as well as many sensationalized articles that don't provide a basis for substantive discussion. Users tend to flag those. If they didn't, climate change wouldn't simply be the most-discussed topic—it would be practically the only topic on HN.
There are also cases of bad flagging, where a particularly substantive article didn't get the discussion it deserved, but these are not nearly as common as people jumping to the conclusion that a topic is being suppressed when they run across a flagged submission. Checking HN search is an easy way to vet that logic (though not as easy as not vetting it). Frequently it turns out that the story has already had significant attention. If, after checking that, you see a particularly substantive article getting flagged, you are welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We sometimes turn off flagging in such cases.
Everybody feels that the topic they consider most important is under-discussed on HN. Actually, every important topic is under-discussed on HN, because frontpage space is the scarcest resource we have: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... There's no way around this on a site that exists for curiosity, because curiosity withers under repetition.