Sorry I meant "flagged and hidden". Just because it's flagged doesn't mean that people can't stop commenting on it. It just doesn't show up on the front page anymore.
Weird indeed. That makes it the only flagged story in the top 100 https://news.ycombinator.com/best list. A lot, like hundreds, of users must have flagged it. (I don't know how ranking works, I just assume that there must be a ratio of upvotes vs flagging and the more upvotes the harder it is to flag).
Yeah, and I think it also has to do with weight of the user (more points = higher weight). That's why I'm asking this question because we give an outsized weight to higher karma users who effectively have censor power (which is a good thing when used against spam). But I'm worried we're curating our own "echo chamber" here.