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Re:Ask HN: Flagging front page stories by mike3m on Tuesday December 10, 2013 @03:52AM (#6879659)
Why flag a non-offensive, non-spam article? That is what the point/vote system is for. If more people in the hackernews community want to read interesting non-technical, non-startup related articles then they are "hacker news", or at least "news interesting to hackers".

The flagging system is to weed out spam, advertisements, offensive/porn, etc. This is flagging abuse IMHO.

Re:Ask HN: Flagging front page stories by jasonkester on Tuesday December 10, 2013 @10:13AM (#6881109)
Why flag a non-offensive, non-spam article?

Because that's the only way to fix the problem.

Bad stories like the ones mentioned by the OP are really popular with a demographic that we don't want here. There are lots of people who love nothing more than to argue about things that make them angry, and if they see something that makes them angry, they'll immediately vote it up so that they can argue about it.

But we don't want this to be a community of angry people arguing with one another. To avoid that, we need mechanisms to actively discourage it.

Simply standing by and hoping that more nerds will upvote Haskell tutorials won't help if the room is rapidly filling up with veteran YouTube commenters.