[wvl]

I find the chronological history of hckrnews.com adds context to why many things get flagged. For example, immediately after the bloomberg article was posted about Google firing the memo author, were several other articles with the same content (from arstechnica and nymag) which were immediately flagged. Any time an inflammatory subject gets beat to death, the same process happens.

So in that respect, I often agree with the submissions that get flagged (including this one), but I do think news.ycombinator.com could do a better job of collecting and displaying these flagged submissions. For example, duplicate submissions could be made children of the submission that was allowed to stay.

[jacquesm]

Those merges sometimes happen but they're a moderator intervention and so have a pretty high cost associated with t them.

The biggest gripe I have with the flagging is the paternalistic aspect.