> *People have different views on what belongs here, but I think it's easy to see why users flagged this article. It's generic nationalistic flamebait, reportin

> *People have different views on what belongs here, but I think it's easy to see why users flagged this article. It's generic nationalistic flamebait, reporting on a statement by a political official, with no significant new information This is reality, not "generic, nationalistic flamebait". It does not matter if the article is from the BBC, or that the statement comes from this particular Trumpist DNI John Ratcliffe, because the sentiment of "China is a threat" is much broader than one person and one article, and that's what people want to talk about -- various ideas tangential to the reporting and this particular story itself. Of course for some topics you mods will dig up a "better" source and manipulate the rankings manually, but for others it's straight to flagging black hole... If you can't see what's "interesting" or "noteworthy" about these political topics from a hacker's perspective, that is your lack of imagination and the fault is not mine. Flagging allows the old guard here to plug their ears whenever an uncomfortable topic comes up. I sincerely think this platform would be better if topics that get tons of votes could not be killed so quickly. Also if anyone really cares about the quality of discussion here, perhaps HN should actually achieve a sane technological solution for displaying a page with more than a few hundred comments. The platform itself is just flat out bad for in-depth discussions. Or give us some ways to sort, like by upvotes only (so I can complain about flagging less). Or actually comply with the GDPR, instead of sinking more time into your shadowy mod tooling.