zlacker

Right now only the people who upvote it get to have a say.

Not so. The people who flag it also get to have a say. And if you observed the site more closely you would notice that their say is quite effective.

>>gruseo+(OP)
Fair enough.

I understand how voting works, but how does the flagging mechanism work? Once it's flagged by (n) people, what happens? I checked http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and I couldn't find anything.

I think flagging is a very different (and basically silent) axis of expression; you can't counter an upvote in the case of controversial, marginally on-topic questions like the drug war one.

I totally agree that some of the powers like voting down and flagging have to be earned through participation, by the way. We do the same thing on Stack Overflow.

>>coding+n
flagging is a very different (and basically silent) axis of expression

I think the silence is a feature not a bug. The meta-noise reached its peak just before flagging was introduced, and it got way better after that. It still flares up intermittently, like now. An interesting observation is that it's mostly new(ish) users who post complaining meta-comments. Perhaps after they've been around for a while they notice that those discussions are always the same, as are the "sky is falling" threads.

Edit: uh-oh, the right margin is fast approaching. And damn it, I had managed to go at least 6 months without getting sucked in to this meta business!

>>gruseo+F
Good and worthy discussion, though, because this is the very heart and soul of designing software (or at least web apps with discussion) for human beings.

>>coding+n
As I understanding, flagging brings articles to the attention of the secret cabal of editors (no one knows who they are, beyond the fact that pg is likely one of them). The more an article is flagged, I presume, the more it stands out to their attention. They then make a manual decision whether to kill the article - and can even bring it back if they change their mind (I've seen that happen a few times).

So flagging in and of itself does not trigger any automatic removal of the article. There has to be a human action to remove the offending article.