This isn't a story about a mass shooting. It's a story about how a very large internet site is responding to the story.

I would agree with you about this particular thread, and I don't think it should be flagged, even though there's no new or interesting phenomenon to stories about Reddit "censorship" either.

But the stories about the shooting itself do deserve to be flagged. A line has to be drawn somewhere, otherwise Hacker News becomes Reddit without subreddits.

But Reddit already exists and is better at being Reddit than HN will ever be.

Meta is death, and this type of speculative meta about some other website is particularly dull.

EDIT: And it's not even about the website, it's about a handful of mods in a handful of subreddits.

Really the answer to this is set up your own subreddit, or use Voat.