And users are free to flag if they deem the content spammy.

Yes, exactly, although I personally don't see how a substantive post, responding to a well-discussed issue from the previous day, could possibly qualify as "spam". I guess others agree, since the post did not remain flagged.

And others are free to disagree with your opinion. I read the content as lacking maturity, emotionally loaded and not the kind of content that fosters productive conversation in HN (as can be evidenced by the caliber of most comments in this thread).

The post is not explicitly flagged but nowhere to be seen in HN first pages. Take that as a hint.

> The post is not explicitly flagged but nowhere to be seen in HN first pages. Take that as a hint.

It's been almost 24 hours since it was posted, a majority of posts are buried by then. The post seems to have followed a fairly normal lifecycle.

I am not a huge fan of the tone of the OP either, but it does have substantive content and discusses genuine issues (though it probably is not the best way to trigger discussion of those issues), some of which have bitten people at my workplace (dealing with bugs in two different very popular products written in Go, the kind of bugs that are simply not possible in other languages) in just the last week.

It would be interesting to see the response to a less inflammatory article discussing the same issues — I have noticed in general that criticism of Go is often badly received around here regardless of its tone.

> It's been almost 24 hours since it was posted, a majority of posts are buried by then.

No. Here's a post with much less upvotes, much less comments still on page 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31205139

There are many other examples if you care to compare.

Meanwhile this post is nowhere to be seen because most conversation here is not up to HN standards.

Flagging is detrimental to post ranking. And rightfully so.

... really? Come on. As of this writing, 29 out of 30 posts on page 2 are younger than this post. 30 out of 30 posts on page 3 are younger than this post. 29 out of 30 posts on page 4 are younger than this post. I could keep going. The fact that you can find one outlier and then wave your hands and say "there are many more" doesn't make your argument reasonable.

> Flagging is detrimental to post ranking. And rightfully so.

As I understand it, flagging is to get moderator attention to posts that don't follow the HN guidelines. It's not the general way to punish posts that upset you, that's called downvoting. Treating flags as a "stronger downvote" basically makes the very concept of flagging worthless.

You should have kept going on.

There are multiple posts older than this one that are listed within the first 9 pages, some of them 2 days older even. While this one isn't.

Take a guess why :)

> The post is not explicitly flagged but nowhere to be seen in HN first pages.

The flag was removed by moderators, but by then the algorithm already did its thing.

> Take that as a hint.

As a hint that sometimes you should do you research before making claims? Agreed.

> I read the content as lacking maturity, emotionally loaded

The article is perfectly fine, but what I gather from the reactions of Go fans is that they are lacking in maturity and become too emotional if their toy is criticized.

Something the author explicitly mentioned in his article. You should read it.