Hacker News Reader

People flag these because they’re abundant and repetitive to the point of saturation.

Just in the last month https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

It's not "censorship" for a community to protect itself from spam, even if it is decentralized spam from people who aren't coordinating with each other.

Ok so wait, the submission I just linked to earlier is now unflagged? That's good I guess, but what's going on??

Some people are flagging it and other people are vouching for it. It looks flagged now.

It just happens. Don't overthink it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Posts complaining about flags are likely to get flagged.

I think they're being flagged for political reasons by individuals rather than breaking any specific HN rule.

However, a lot of the Trump/Tesla/Musk/environment news stories do tend to attract poor quality comments and so that can be a good reason for the story to be removed from the front page.

I've read than Dang does attempt to de-flag some of the more blatantly partisan flagging, but there does seem to be a lot of news stories about the U.S. administration these days.