Tell HN: Keep flagging. It's critically important for us to be able to collectively remove low quality discourse, submissions that violate the HN community guidelines, and outright spam. If you notice that your submissions in particular are consistently flagged, consider that the problem is not with the larger community.
In theory HN already has the perfect implementation of this: you can turn on "showdead" in your profile settings, then flagged posts should become visible to you on the frontpage (as long as they are highly upvoted like the rest). This approach solves the problem for those who dislike flagging, without inconveniencing those who like flagging. But I'm not sure it actually works, can someone check?
I've watched the "dead" and flagged submissions and from what I have seen it has mostly been advertisements, political blogs, sites that invoke emotional response. Can you summarize examples of other content types that were flagged, without linking to the content that was flagged?
It would be a disaster if follow-up opinion pieces on inflammatory topics didn't get flagged. The front page would consist mostly of those, and they'd all turn into flamewars. The quieter, interesting submissions on unexpected topics—the lifeblood of HN—would get choked out, and HN would suffocate.
You may be under the misimpression that HN is a place for discussing the most important current events. It's not. The most important current events are far, far more important than almost everything on HN's front page. That's because HN is a different kind of site. Not every place on the internet needs to be the same, and I think there's room for one (at least!) which is dedicated to intellectual curiosity.
