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Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

If many people 'vouch' for it, it will get unflagged.

If you 'vouch' or 'flag' things the mods don't approve of, it gets disabled on your account.

Confirmed in private conversation with dang [1], he restored it after I promised to behave, and now it stopped working again as I didn't properly toe the line.

Quite hypocritical to give power to the user with the tacit expectation that you share the same opinions and political bent as the moderation team.

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1: quote: "I'm afraid we took vouching privileges away from your account because you vouched for too many comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines"

This site is a fucking joke. It doesn't foster discussion, rather it fosters "allowed" discussion. Things that will make the Y-combinator folks more money because that is all they value. Tech is just a means to an end. And these notions of "site guidelines" seem to not apply at all to Elon's folks!

So, you know it pretty much like any right-wing-owned news site.

I believe the mods have integrity based on their past comments, but the silent disabling of various user features is highly questionable at best. I'm pretty sure my flagging/vouching/possibly voting privileges got silently revoked at some point, but I'm not going to ask about it because it'll only piss me off. (And no, I'm not going to "improve my behavior" to fit some arbitrary Overton window given, you know, everything.)

Unfortunately that's not the way it works. If it's [flagged] [dead] because of user flagging, some users can vouch for it to revive it.

But if it's merely [flagged] (with associated penalties keeping it off the front pages) there is no option for vouching to remove the penalty.

This one is currently [flagged] with no option for vouching.

You are right.

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