Ask HN: Self-Censorship of the HN Community
The ability of certain users with high levels of karma to flag topics leads to censorship. Calling it community self-regulation does not change the fact, that in case with controversial topics a single person can make it so, that a submission never reaches the front page or, if a submission is, in fact, interesting for some users and thus upvoted to the front page, disappears (rather shortly) after the conversation has already begun, and the majority of users never get the chance to see it and participate in the discussion, even if it could be interesting to some of them as well.
I totally understand, how this can help to mitigate submission of illicit content and how this relieves moderators from a lot of work by outsourcing moderation to users.
Having said that, my concern is that:
1) There are a lot of users with high enough karma. This makes the probability, that someone will be pissed/upset by a certain topic, unacceptably high.
2) I'd even argue, that it's pretty easy to get a high enough karma just by doing regular submissions. E.g. if you submit a couple of links daily over a sufficiently long period of time, there's a good probability that a couple of submissions turn out to be popular.
Does the fact, that you make regular submissions, entitle you to moderation of discussions started by other people? I don't think so.
Also, there's a "conspiracy" side to this. What prevents an adversary, who is indeed interested in targeted censorship (as opposed to genuinely pissed/upset users), from using this tactic to create a user account with high karma? It's important to say that, as I imagine, such an adversary is able to plan strategically and act in advance, so they would already have created such accounts by this moment. I.e. there may already exist users, that are either completely fake or affiliated with adversaries.