Nor did I claim there was. My point is simply that there is a very obvious pattern to what passes this subjective "gratifies intellectual curiosity" test among those with the ability to flag posts from the front page.
Case in point, this thread is now being visibly flagged off the homepage:
"ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543420
It's inarguably tech-relevant and for the intellectually curious. And yet...
All that their "anti-politics" flags really do is to make HN more of a "head-in-the-sand" echo-chamber for right-wing ideologies.
It's not necessarily "right-wing" per se, for example during COVID questioning the party line on masks and vaccines could catch you massive downvotes and flagging. It's this technocratic neoliberal cryptofascist thing the people who have always actually run Silicon Valley adhere to.
The biggest vulnerably of the entire social media model is the "engagement pyramid" where the number of viewers is much larger than the number of upvoters is much larger than the number of commenters.
HN gets ~5 million monthly unique visitors, or 150,000 per day (conservatively assuming each visitor only shows up once, so that number is probably much larger). But if you look the top post right now has around ~1,500 upvotes, and ~200 comments (and, if you look, comment sections frequently have single users commenting repeatedly, so less than 200 actual people commenting).
This makes it very easy and very worth it to run even loosely coordinated commenting/upvoting rings. 10 people can easily downvote a new post off the homepage, give the impression that the community disapproves of a certain opinion, disrupt conversation, etc.
What's funny is that proposing this is often treated as a claim of a wild conspiracy theory. But the weakness in most conspiracy theories is that they require high levels of coordination among similarly large groups of actors, often for little reward. In this case it's almost more outrageous to claim that this isn't happening (especially since I have personally seen teams of people coordinate to get their startups work on the front page). I suspect even 3 very coordinated people could do a lot to control the front page (or alternatively increasingly large N of increasingly less coordinated people).