[J-dawg]

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

Flagging is supposed to be used for spam or off-topic content. People who flag stuff they don't agree with are not following the guidelines of this community.

'whalesalad' is apparently breaking the guidelines twice, first by flagging something simply because they don't agree with the discussion that might ensue, and secondly by commenting to say that they flagged.

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

[dvfjsdhgfv]

This is theory. What I describe is how this works in practice: commenters on HN use flag as a tool to silence opposing views. It happens every day, hard to overlook it.