This is the critical point. Today, users can "vouch" for [dead] stories, but can't vouch for [flagged] stories until they get flagged so much that they convert to [dead].
The other "Tank Man" story was flagged, but never quite dead, so users couldn't vouch for it; from users' perspective, it appeared to simply disappear.
Allowing users to vouch for the other story would have helped considerably.
In a hilarious twist of fate, searching for that term brings up papers on either medical research or peer-review reliability problems in general[0]. You try to find data on a potentially abstract, complex societal issue, and come up with what can only be described as attention grabbing HN-catnip.
0: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain...
What's particularly insidious is that killed stories both don't show up in Algolia search results (this is somewhat understandable, but in the case of political flagging, problematic), and even where favourited (something I also do with some regularity), may not be visible to non-logged-in users and IIRC actually disappear from the index in time.
EDIT: The "flagging trustworthiness" could even help mods to find posts which might need to be unflagged quicker based on the average trustworthiness of the flags.
> What does [flagged] mean?
> It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News.
(I've also done that by mistake like four times.)
Without user flagging HN will be unusable.
Or you could do what I did: something unknown that resulted in years of being limited to about 4 replies a day.
Isn't this already a thing with the "vouch" button on said posts? https://i.imgur.com/Hp9nu58.png
This problem happens again and again with hot topics, and at the moment the default behavior is to let them disappear, which is a bit lame.
That said, I normally chalk it up to the sites topic's and interest being a little more diverged from my own, Which is perfectly fine as I typically enjoy the moderated approach over the constant outrage and flame fests i see elsewhere.
So you have a long term otherwise great user who contributes positively who has a strong opinion on a political issue that you don't want all over your forum for or against. People tend to flag it for you but its not controversial enough to fall in a hail of flags. Keeping it flagged fortunately takes a relatively small effort saving mod effort.
You introduce vouch for flagged stories. Now your user vouches for absolutely EVERYTHING on his side of an issue and his opposite number vouches for everything on the other side.
Content that isn't low quality and resonates with a good number of people is likely to attract votes even if its off topic and ultimately not desired on that forum and direct and constant mod effort is now required to keep it off because super upvotes now counter super down votes. Welcome to your new political forum.
(Maybe the karma threshold is different, but i do see it)
[dead]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397440 (has vouch)
[flagged]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396685 (no vouch)
But at the same time, it also seems like flagging can be too easily abused, and can lead to accusations of censorship and distrust. (Though I've certainly seen it work well in cases, especially for false/defamatory articles.)
But it really does seem like we're at the point where longstanding users need to also be able to vouch for flagged stories, or something like that. And even if that doesn't automatically restore the story, it could at least show a label like "pending moderator decision" or something.
At a time where trust in the media and authority is low... a little bit of greater transparency might go a long way. :)