I mentioned that I flag pretty much all of the climate change stories, and got my flag powers revoked. C'est la vie, I guess. I still don't think those stories add anything to this site besides some of the same old tired flame wars, so I'd probably continue flagging those and politics if I got the flag link back.
I'm sorry if this is blunt but in my opinion it is good that your flagging rights were removed. For every person who personally doesn't like climate change stories, there is a person who doesn't like Ruby on Rails stories, a person who doesn't like patent stories, a person who doesn't like NSA stories, and another person who doesn't like Node.js stories. Because flagging has such a strong effect on ranking, it should be reserved for highly inappropriate posts. With great power comes great responsibility.
Hardly any of the climate change stories are "interesting", but basically just "LOOK SEE I AM RIGHT IN MY BELIEFS AND THIS PROVES IT" sorts of articles. Those are poisonous to a site like this - they just beget a lot of useless discussion without much substance in it.
In other words, they are, IMO, highly inappropriate posts, not just stuff I happen to find uninteresting or don't like.
Climate change articles may not be interesting to you, but they are interesting to plenty of people. Might it just be your already formed belief that they are uninteresting that makes you find most of the climate change articles uninteresting? The comment you wrote here could equally well have been written by a person who is flagging any of the other categories I mentioned. The rules say:
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Climate change definitely fits that description. Lets search for climate change: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=climat... None of those articles look any more inappropriate for HN to me, compared to what you'd find for any of the other categories I mentioned.
If you think a comment in a discussion is inappropriate, you shouldn't flag the story, you should flag the comment.
Do you really think most of those climate change articles are being posted by people who find them "intellectually gratifying"? I think most of them are pointing to stuff they think supports their own point of view, and they wish to share as widely as possible with the world.
How many articles are there about uncontroversial, but interesting aspects of climate science? Do any of them ever get upvoted, ever?
For instance, in the search that I provided, there are several articles that I find intellectually gratifying, for example "Decoding Climate Change with Perl, gnuplot and Google Earth" and "Climate Change Authority Admits Mistake" from the MIT technology review and "Nasa.gov: Evidence of Climate Change". Do you think these articles are less intellectually gratifying as articles about the NSA or articles discussing the merit or insanity of Node.js? If so, then you are applying a much higher standard to climate change articles than those other articles.
But whether or not YOU should find these articles intellectually gratifying is beside the point. We already have a feature for those kind of articles: don't upvote them. Flagging is not for those kind of stories. Again, if you find a discussion inappropriate, flag the comments in the discussion. Anyway, I don't think this discussion is going to be productive any more, so this will be my last comment.
Political stories are off-topic and should not be posted here. Most of the climate change articles seem to me to be pretty much about people's political beliefs, rather than an inherent interest in climate science or meteorology or something. That's why I flagged them. What other sorts of climate science do you find interesting? I find it odd that so many people are so very "intellectually gratified" by stuff that revolves around the very political "climate change" stuff, but don't seem to care too much for other kinds of more mundane science.
I probably would not have flagged the perl/gnuplot one, I'll grant you that one.
Node.js articles are on topic, even if one or the other happens to be boring. So I would not flag them, even the most uninteresting ones.
