That might even cause more of a tug of war, tbh...I don't feel transparency would really help in these cases, though I say that only because in my anecdotal survivor-bias-affected short-term memory, just as many controversial social issues posts are allowed to stay up on top as are flagkilled. And I don't think there's an "ideal" balance, in that everyone has a different ideal balance.

But anything that makes it obvious that a flamewar is going on would just exacerbate it. Seems to be the case with Reddit. For me, my own "flag" is if a post has as many comments as upvotes...in fact, I assumed that this was something that would auto-downmod a front page submission.

The community disagrees with itself about what belongs on HN. Any time flags you disagree with win out over upvotes is going to feel like "abuse of the flagging feature".

I'm not aware of any alternative to the current voting/flagging system that would balance the concerns more effectively. Certainly any solution will include cases that leave many users unsatisfied.