[kX4A8o4mVmX8aW]

Flagging goes both ways. There's a flagged post in this account's short history where I pushed back on a transphobic comment. Now various comments up from mine and down another branch are all flagged. Transphobic and anti-transphobic comments are all flagged to oblivion.

Probably the hope is that there are more nice people than not-nice people so on the whole the not-nice comments will disappear. From that one experience though it looks like it's at least as much about who's fastest to flag.

[dang]

For sure flagging goes both ways on political/ideological flamewars. How could it be otherwise? That's not what HN is for.

The thing to do with egregious comments is not to feed them by replying, but to flag them (and in particularly bad cases, to email [e-mail] to make sure we see it).

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