zlacker

There ought to be a time-based flagging limit, so that people don't abuse the system. I've already raised this earlier.

If Company A makes a killer product announcement, rival Company B could simply get its employees to spam down votes on and flag that post. Company A gets less visibility, and dang won't be able to come on time to stop it.

This is an easily plausible hypothetical, which may already be happening.

>>fakeda+(OP)
Flagging requires high HN karma. You get that by being a positive member of the community. Most such people, if a company even has one, would find it against their personal ethics to do that. And dang can see the karma ratio and unflag any actually worthwhile announcements.

>>LordDr+k7
I think as people have become more and more aware that flag negatively weights items for rankings, and isn't just a "hey have the mods look at this rule breaking thing", more people have started using it as a downvote button. It was my understanding that HN originally didn't have a downvote feature to avoid the kind of issues that the flag usage is now causing.

>>Macha+L9
Even the highest karma users can lose their flagging privileges, temporarily or perhaps even permanently, if they do it enough times within a time window or if abuse is detected. So from what I understand that issue should be taken care of.