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Usually the answer given to the question "why is this article on the front page" is "because users upvoted it". Now it seems what users think does not matter.

• dang 9y ago
  > Now it seems I get how fun it is to do the long jump, but given that we're talking about something that happens less than 0.0001% of the time, it seems fair to expect a bit better reply quality than this.
  • rimliu 9y ago
    I am probably missing something, but does that mean that you can do anything as long as you do it seldom enough?
    • dang 9y ago
      It means that a tiny floating-point delta is not a bitwise negation.
    • DanBC 9y ago
      People were abusing the flag option. It's a good thing that mods fix that.
• sgift 9y ago
  Flagging is a separate system from upvotes. It still needs upvotes to be on the front page - which it has.
  • rimliu 9y ago
    What difference does it make if it is the same system or the separate one? I am talking about users' will being ignored there on the whim of someone, just because s/he knows better.
    • sgift 9y ago
      Flagging is - as far as I know - not intended as some system to impose the users 'will'. HN does not allow downvoting of submissions. Flagging is a mechanism to remove topics which are off-topic and/or low-quality from HN, not to remove topics some people don't like.
    • icebraining 9y ago
      Flagging allows a relatively small number of users to bury a story before most have had a chance to see it. Often this is good, sometimes it isn't. In HN, it's the mods right and duty to override when latter happens.