Edit: oh, you were asking about comments. In my haste I missed that and thought you were asking about submissions.

There are lots of comments in this thread that aren't flagged, so discussion isn't being prevented. It's true that a lot of the earlier comments were flagged, but that was (or should be) because they were flamebait. It's one of the downsides of internet commenting that the flameiest and most reflexive comments appear first in a thread—because those reactions are the quickest to flare up. Better, more reflective comments always take longer [1]. This goes 1000x for a topic like this one, unfortunately.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

-- original reply --

I've answered that several times in the links I listed; can you take a look and, if there's something specific I haven't addressed, let me know?

(I don't mean to be dismissive—it just takes a surprising amount of time to write those things and I can't do it at the moment.)

It's surprisingly dismissive. It's not that because not all of the comments aren't flagged that discussion isn't being prevented. And the (or should be) does most of the work when you talk about flagged are flagged because they were flamebait.

I'm pretty sure it's not an easy task to moderate HN. But I'm still surprised by the answer here.

I'm sorry, but I don't follow your point here.

Keep in mind that I was commenting about the situation very early in the thread. My comment applies only to the very first comments that got posted, perhaps the first couple dozen–no later.

I'm sorry to insist but there are groups here who abuse flagging as a censorship tool to suppress opinions they disagree with.

Anything that goes against the status quo has a high chance of being flagged, I've seen this happen over and over and especially recently.

Especially since it only takes two accounts to flag a comment.

To prevent the flagging you would have to block an entire country which has an army of people trying to prevent discussion as we speak.