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Comment by ggdG | Hacker News Reader

> lots of people flag stories based on their experience of what the threads are like

IMHO story submissions should be judged based upon their own merits. Toxic commenters can be downvoted/banned but the story submitter shouldn't be punished for the misbehavior of others.

> I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.

You mean purely based on the expected awfulness of imagined future comments, instead of the actual comments? If so, with a precrime mindset like that, you're fanning the flames of controversy.

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It's good to want things! We can just disagree.

There's not enough space on the front page for all the good things we want to read. I'm not interested in expending extra effort to rescue marginal stories with a low likelihood of generating a good conversation. The people most invested in these kinds of stories seem to be almost the least invested in HN's rubric of curious conversation.

I don't call any of the shots around here, but I think I speak for a bunch of different users who flag this way.

> I'm not interested in expending extra effort to rescue marginal stories with a low likelihood of generating a good conversation.

I didn't ask you to expend effort in rescuing stories. I took issue with the way you expend effort in burying stories, even before the comment section turns out to go sideways:

> I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.

It takes very little effort at all to flag stories that I'm convinced are both colorably off-topic, or duplicative of other marginally topical stories that have run within the last year, and that I'm convinced will create nightmare threads. That's the purpose of the flagging system. That system is also monitored, so that people who abuse it as a super-downvote for stories they just don't like quietly lose flagging powers. So: I plan to keep on doing it.

Remember though: we're not having this conversation so you can persuade me to change how I use the site. I'm just one doofus here. Wha ye need tae worry about are the t'ousand doofuses standing behind me. (_The Devil's Own_, 1997, starring Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford).

It doesn't get less curious that "I try to bury discussion before it even happens and can't even explain why". You should be ashamed that you spend so much time here yet fundamentally do not get the rules.

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