When I first joined HN, I aggressively flagged stories and comments that didn't meet the guidelines. I thought that's what I was supposed to do. However, one day my comment flagging privileges disappeared with no explanation. If someone had contacted me and explained how I was misusing flags, I would have happily self-corrected.
It wasn't clear either to me or the moderator what had resulted in the loss of privilege. On the one hand, that made it easy to decide to reinstate the privilege; on the other hand that made it hard to learn what I'd done wrong.
Comment flagging privileges don't disappear (edit: alone). Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585939.
But I am still confused about the apparent contradiction with what you've stated versus what was stated in the blog post, about losing flagging privs. When flagging privs are lost, are _all_ flagging privs lost? Or is minimaxr correct[0], that it works the other way, where you can lose story flagging privs without losing comment flagging privs?
Edit: Ok, I checked it. Story and comment flagging privileges are lost or retained as a set. You can't have, or lose, one without the other. It's not clear why minimaxir thought otherwise, since I'm pretty sure the code has always worked this way.