The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

My personal guess is…

I bet flags weigh more from high karma users. It seems likely that there is a small, dedicated band of anti-DF users with high karma who flag everything.

It probably only takes a few people with enough karma to kill a post, which is consistent with the fact that some posts have a reasonable half life. I don’t think it’s a formal gray list.

Which is a problem and perhaps there needs to be big "resets" of karma when you turn into a cabal. Wikipedia wouldn't work if it was run mostly by people like this, and I am sad to see it going in that direction too.