The only people who I can imagine flagging this post are Meta PR, or users who are bringing their politics into a non-political post. If anyone has any other reasonable explanations, I would love to hear them.
Looks like the title was edited, original title: Facebook Is Censoring 404 Media Stories About Facebook's Censorship
We can only guess why users flag things. In this case, I don't have a good guess, other than that the article title is baity, so I replaced it with more neutral language from the subtitle, and (partly) rolled back the flags.
The flaggers may be correct, in any case, because this thread is noticeably terrible.
And yeah, I thought that this topic would have garnered a better discussion.
(nice to see you still commenting here btw!)
I check in often, but don't comment much anymore.
I'm sure you've considered this feature, but since flagging is such a heavyweight (in terms of ranking impact) activity, shouldn't a flagger need to at least articulate (via text or a drop-down menu) why they are flagging it? Even vague choices like "Site guideline violation," "Spam," "Astroturfing," "Political flame bait" might offer some of the missing insight.
If it's overhead for the flagger, they could be presented with a single multi choice question, eg:
What most deserves flagging: a)item title b) item content c) hn discussion d) something else
With different users presented with different questions to build up a picture.
Flags could be recorded even if the question isn't answered, but with you reserving the right to weight ones without answers less.