You're right, and the people complaining are also right because the story does deserve oxygen—just not all the oxygen. It's our job to balance this so it gets some oxygen but not all the oxygen.

The system tends not to be able to do this without human intervention—either the flags win (in which case the story gets smothered) or the upvotes win (in which case HN becomes Twittermusk News with a side dish of SBFTX). Human intervention is needed to keep the teeter-totter from teetering one way or tottering the other*.

We're super open to feedback. If you (or anyone) want to influence the balance, you should make your case to hn@ycombinator.com. That's the only reliable message queue.

More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667761

(* Unfortunately. It would be so much nicer to just write code to deal with this.)