I might be missing something here - why would people flag it? HN has never struck me as being this petty. Anal retentive, pedantic, and difficult (citation required, sigh). What am I missing?

I didn't flag, but as has been pointed out many times on previous discussions of this, the consensus seems to be that if Apple didn't moderate their forums and remove incendiary posts or threats of lawsuits, they would be opening themselves up to more unhappy customers doing the same. A forum isn't the place to demand Apple fix something, the Apple store or their support line is the place for that. Likewise, a forum isn't a place to bring threats of a lawsuit against the company who owns the forum.

The fact that someone is trying so hard to make this become controversial and news-worthy is the only interesting thing here.

There is only one explanation I can think of and I am not sure I believe it myself: Apple fan boys at work?

I don't think flagging pushes a post down, that would not be in the spirit of how this community was designed.

Flagging is just supposed to summon a moderator and that's all.

Flagging does push a post down the ranks; I've never heard of summoning a moderator. Flags alone can also kill stories entirely if they come before it gains many points. The voting ring detection and flame-war detection code also push a post down the ranks.

So, the Lessig post could've been flagged, the comments on it could've triggered the flame war code, or a moderator did it.

What almost definitely didn't happen is "Apple fan boys at work" flagging down anything anti-Apple. When you use the flag link any more than extremely sparingly, you lose the privilege, permanently.

Flagging does, in fact push posts down. I believe the amount is proportional to the flagger's karma.

Psychologically, the UI seems intended to separate "I don't like this" from "I think this content is detrimental to the site". This communicates that users should not attempt to punish links they simply dislike, but may do so with comments.

Yes it does, and PG is allowing everyone to have basically an infinite amount of flagging now. It used to be that if you used it more than 10-20 times (maybe in a period of time), you would have the ability removed.

I flagged it because it's just not interesting. Where's the "hacker news" angle? That a company's community representatives should never remove posts? That Lawrence Lessig should somehow enjoy immunity from what they try to uphold?

Company screws up some software upgrade, hundreds of uses swam their forums and complain. Who would be served from 100s of threads about the same thing with no solutions?

It's generally not "censhorship" unless the government does it. Your speech is not being suppressed by Apple not wanting spam in their forums. It's not some deep conspiracy to drive up Apple stock price.

So who really cares? Someone who has not upgraded to the latest iOS and needs WiFi access to drive his life critical system?

This is pretty brutal and disingenuous IMHO. If this is considered proper justification for flagging this post, I'm not surprised why there's such a positive Apple slant here.

If it's not interesting, don't upvote it. Flagging is for worse things than that.

replying because I'm going to refer to this comment as a prime example of how HN's moderation is going downhill in all future posts. Thanks for the ammo.

> pedantic, and difficult (citation required, sigh)

It's actually [citation needed]. ;).

Source?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed and http://xkcd.com/285/.

WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A VALID SOURCE (but I'll accept xkcd.com) ;)

I'd argue it is, when the topic is meta; i.e. about the Wikipedia itself. But thankfully we have xkcd ;).

There is a more or less open campaign to flag NSA stories despite the appearance that some kind of crisis is coming to head about about spying on European allies and that General Alexander and the UK PM are openly calling for media censorship.

Since we currently have a "225 points, 18 hours ago" on the front page at #20, it's obvious something's going on.

Are we seeing two different HNs? I see Lessig's post at #80 and 245 points.

Sorry should have been clearer. My point was: the "Winter is coming" post was posted around the same time as Lessig's post, has less points and yet is at #20. How does that happen?

Btw, only 15 minutes after your original post, and Lessig's post know is upvoted to 245 points already yet is 2 places down...

It's not total votes that counts, but rather votes per time. So two posts of the same age and same vote count could be in different places if one has recent votes and the other older votes.

PG posted the HN ranking algorithm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417

The time of the votes is not taken into account. The time-based decay is only based on the submission time. A story with the same votes and same submission time will have the same rank regardless of when the votes occurred, all other factors being equal.

pg mentioned in a thread about 'where did X MS post go' that posts can trigger flamewar detectors which penalizes the post heavily.

It's not a simple votes/age thing.

Ugh, enough with the implied conspiracy theories and the meta-discussion about vote mechanics. It's obviously not a very vast conspiracy since we're discussing the story now.

"Ugh"? You're disgusted?

I don't know why your comment was greyed, but I find it interesting that the poisoning the well [1] in the grandparent was granted a nice black font.

[1] http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallaci...

I think the title is a bit too bait-y and trollish for its own good. I almost flagged it on sight and I'm no Apple fanboy by any measure (the only apple product I've owned in my life was an old iPod). I assume it's a slashdot reference but still.