Ok, one perfect (I think) example that this still isn't perfect:

If I hadn't checked /active today I would have missed the story about Google classifying 1 and 0 as copyrighted.

Is there a reason why flagging that story shouldn't count as abusing flags?

Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405? It wasn't flagged. (More precisely, it was, but the flags were dropped by HN's anti-abuse system, and wouldn't have affected the story's rank in any case because the upvotes were massively dominant.) The post spent 13 hours on HN's front page. This seems like things working the way they should—am I missing something?

OK, you are probably right again.

It is just that I spend quite a lot of time on HN and I missed it until I checked /active.

So either I didn't notice it at first or I had a 13 hour break from HN ;-)

That said, doesn't some stories with a 5-600 hundred upvotes linger on the front page for days? Am I mistaken? (And if not - do you have time to explain why I can find a <700 points story here the next day but not this one?)

You might be surprised how much stuff you miss on HN. At least I am, and there can't be many people who monitor it more than I do (at least I hope there aren't! as I'm paid to). If you look at the front page links on past days (https://news.ycombinator.com/front, linked as 'past' in the top bar), you'll see that there are a lot of significant front page stories in a day. You need to click "More" at the bottom at least once or twice to see them all.

It's actually kind of a shocking exercise to do, because it brings home how there is no "real" HN - we all think we're seeing "the" front page, but it's a Heraclitus (Heraclitian?) river.

> doesn't some stories with a 5-600 hundred upvotes linger on the front page for days?

That should be very rare. The software downweights any story that has been on the front page for more than 15 hours, unless we specifically tell it not to (which we might do if the community was particularly enjoying it). If the upvotes are massive enough, a story can linger on the front page despite that penalty, but then moderators will notice it and push it below the front page.

> do you have time to explain why I can find a <700 points story here the next day but not this one?

I have time, but I don't understand the question!

> I have time, but I don't understand the question!

I have realized I was probably wrong again ;-)

People who "false flag" should have their voting power diminished immensely.

There's no such thing as a "false flag", just as there's no such thing as a "false upvote". Fradulent? Abusive? Sure. But true/false implies these things are objective.

While you are probably technically correct, remember many here are not native English speakers.

Given the quotes it seems poster was aware that the word wasn't perfect.

I'd try something along the lines of "I guess the word you are looking for here is fraudulent or abusive".

That’s kind of passive aggressive in my opinion (I believe you’ll disagree, and that’s fine), I’m unlikely to adopt that communication style.