Voting, moderation, and flagging are affordances with predictable uses. Even the designers of such systems may find themselves being told the equivalent of "you're holding it wrong" (this occure to me some time back in an earlier life).
I'd generally defer to actual use as well-known reality, rather than unqualified abuse. If that causes problems with platform goals, then the system should build in checks on such impacts, as HN has.
There's been a ton of news about the cross between tech billionaires and politics that all have repurcussions for the economy and industry but not only do they none not end up on the front page they're flagged to death.
Hn loves discussing airplanes, but nothing about elons wreckless approach to the faa going forward can be discussed because users are flagging?
Point remains that the best way to resolve this isn't snark or whinging on threads, but emails to mods. They (dang and others) are well aware of this limitation and have occasionally expressed frustrations. Member-based moderation works relatively well, for much discussion, but does have some profound limitations. Acknowledge and work with those.
I don't think I'm whining or being snarky. I made one comment based on observations and shared my worthless opinion.
I don't expect to resolve it, I'm just a passer by, it's not my website. I'm fammilar with the mostly hands off approach the mods want to take towards topics here.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
(Flagging here is effectively a type of voting behaviour.)
As to issues with HN's collaborative filtering (voting, flagging, vouching) features, dang's addressed that:
Sure there's abuse of the flagging system; there's abuse of everything. But HN's system as a whole (consisting of community, moderators, and software) has countervailing mechanisms for that and other abuses....
