zlacker

>>lawles+(OP)
Thanks for sharing. The way things are here, this will soon be censored - sorry, I meant flagged - here as well.

>>lbrito+ox1
Attentive readers will note how often the "this will be censored" comments appear in threads that spend many hours on HN's frontpage.

>>dang+yI1
I get the irony, but its a bit meaningless since we can't compare the quantity of these (yet) uncensored posts with those that have been taken down, and thus aren't visible.

More importantly, other commentors here have already admitted to flagging this entry. The way flagging exists now rewards one-sideism and partisan behaviour - all it takes is a relatively small group of discontented people to take down a story that is otherwise interesting to the vast majority of posters. A counter-flag option would balance things.

>>lbrito+UN1
> all it takes is a relatively small group of discontented people to take down a story that is otherwise interesting to the vast majority of posters.

That's not accurate, because if a story is interesting to the vast majority of users, it will get lots of upvotes—and lots of upvotes is enough to defeat a small number of flags. In that sense, we already have the counter-flag option you're arguing for.

>>dang+7V1
That's good to know, thank you for the explanation.

Stories don't always get the chance to gather the sufficient amount of up votes before being nipped in the bud by dissatisfied flaggers though, depending on the time of day. Some of them, like >>46357887 , clearly had great interest here and got a large number of upvotes that was, nonetheless, insufficient to prevent the flagging.

>>lbrito+iX1
That's true. Then again, however, if a story is important enough to the community, it will get reposted—sometimes many times, either with the same URL or a different one. It's not so easy as people assume for flags to suppress that kind of story.

The submission you linked to (>>46357887 ), however, was not that kind of story (i.e. one which the majority of users want to see on the frontpage). Rather, it was the kind of story that some users want to see on the front page, but not the majority of users*.

It's the latter class of story which is more vulnerable to flags. That's generally what we want in a flagging system, and I think most HN users would agree with that in principle (though not of course in specific cases where the story is something that one personally finds interesting).

* This is predictable from its skeleton, btw: "person X says provocative thing Y about divisive topic Z" is usually not significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...)