If a story has enough flags, that alone will kill it, without moderator intervention. I just added a point threshold to prevent this happening to stories that have received a significant number of votes.
It might be better to make that proportional -- e.g. that 20 upvotes needs 30 flags. I think there are enough "junk" upvotes (catchy title that people upvote without reading, somebody's favorite topic, but didn't read the article, new users that aren't quite used to the HN vibe, etc.) and now a sufficient number of users that getting 10 votes probably isn't all that hard.
What I'd actually most like changed is that dead links become unclickable. The fact that a link doesn't belong here doesn't mean I don't want to see what it was.
It's not page rank (links are nofollow till they get 5 karma) but traffic. I want spammers to realize they get so little traffic from HN that it's not worth posting here.
Without diving into the code, can you tell us the algorithm? Does it scale based on upvotes? Such that a 200 vote story is harder to kill than 70? Or is it just that once a story passes 50 upvotes it can't be programmatically killed?
