A more charitable interpretation is that lots of techy HN'ers would rather defend CF against an unknown company, as some sort of tribal allegiance - the same way Apple has a huge cult following. Nonetheless the end result (flagging/downranking) is wrong - hell, I had to find this thread by going to my previous comments as I couldn't find it on the front 2 pages. If that isn't considered an abuse of systems (again, charitably speaking, unintentionally), I don't know what is.

I don’t think we need any conspiracy theories. I can easily see people getting tired of these kind of articles and the predictable torrent of outraged comments.

They are valuable in keeping people aware of what’s going on. But only to a point and people will endlessly argue over where that point is and scream censorship and over ups by corporate interests.

It gets rather grating after a while. Even more so when I suspect an article is omitting key facts to generate the attention they want.

I haven’t flagged this article but I can easily see why people would.