[causi]

I hope we restrain ourselves to flagging behavior on HN.

Like many informal groups, it's difficult to judge the composition of the whole when you might be seeing just the actions of the very active few. You'll notice certain topics tend to provoke flagging and downvoting wildly out of proportion with the nature of the comments, and I believe this is because those have particular user interest groups with very ahem strong opinions. You may have also noticed how your comments tend to do quite well when they're new, but somehow pick up a basket of downvotes hours after the post has fallen off the front page. I believe these to be due to a population of generic haters crawling over every post downvoting large numbers of comments.