It's OK to flag anything - that's free will at play.

It's especially OK to flag things that are off-topic as per the guidelines:

    Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

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

as opposed to:

    On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

There was very little in the linked thread that gratified intellectual curiosity.

> It's OK to flag anything - that's free will at play.

If it was organic and from regular users, I would agree with you. However, I don't think it is, considering how targeted the flagging is.

If you don't agree with me, then at least consider the possibility. Wouldn't you want to make it harder for people to do that?

There are already barriers to flagging, many threads get flagged by people who have passsed those barriers and are deemed entitled to flag.

A number of flagged posts are vouched for, leading to posts being unflagged - such as the linked post which is no longer flagged.

You appear to be arguing that the ocean should be wetter.

I have provided a link that was flagged, but it's not flagged anymore. So, it was both deemed to be a valid submission and for the most part it was invisible to users - ergo, the damage was done.

What you are describing obviously doesn't work.