For some reason people seem to be assuming that more lately (i.e. that "flagged" means mods did it). I'm not quite sure how to correct that notion. I suppose we could hyperlink "[flagged]" to an explanation...but would people click? It's not as if this isn't in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Explanations don't seem to help much.
It wouldn't explain a recent change, but the label "flag" does imply calling something to someone's attention, and that someone would presumably be a moderator. Whether or not not stories are killed immediately by flagging (and it makes sense to me that they are), would it be reasonable for a moderator to eventually review everything that is flagged, or at least everything flagged by more than one person? I don't have a good sense of what the volume would be, but I think it would lead to better results than allowing a tiny number of of users to suppress stories without administrative review.
We do review all of them. But there are so many that I can't say we review them all equally closely. A lot of the time we're tired and just skimming. Vigilant users' contributions are extremely helpful.
That would indeed be unambiguous. But it would also be verbose and there's something about that which doesn't fit the HN spirit.
I don't know that unambiguousness would even be all that helpful. I have a feeling that all the same complaints would continue, they'd just route around it, as the old internet adage goes.
