[qb45]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

I too normally dislike things disappearing from the front page in 5 minutes but I made an exception for this submission and flagged it because such stories are dime in a dozen and this one brings zero new information, solves nothing and mainly just perpetuates hostility.

[sctb]

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868934 and marked it off-topic.

[KirinDave]

Fair enough. Thanks for the note. I was confused.

[KirinDave]

So you're saying you flagged this despite the fact that it is in not off-topic.

Because you dislike the narrative it establishes?

[tptacek]

You can do that, but if you abuse the flag button like that, your flag button is going to quietly stop working.

[qb45]

Everybody knows it and I wouldn't be bringing attention to myself like that if I used flags often enough to care, I come here in part to read about all sorts of weird stuff people post and flagging is largely counterproductive to that. Plus I doubt that I'm going to have it disabled for merely selective enforcement of the official guidelines.