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It's unfortunate that turning off flags for a story empowers the people who want to use this site for ideological battle. "dang made an exception once for <my pet topic>, so the guidelines forever more don't apply to it!" There were several variants of this sentiment expressed on the tomhow welcome thread.

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I'm not following the argument here, but turning off the flags on a given story doesn't turn HN into a free-for-all on a topic (on the contrary, we don't want too much repetition of any topic), and certainly the guidelines continue to apply as much as anymore. More, in fact ("Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

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