If everyone flagged every article they found uninteresting, particularly something that rarely comes up here, because they're afraid it will become common on HN

If everyone flagged every article they found uninteresting, particularly something that rarely comes up here, because they're afraid it will become common on HN, then we'd pretty quickly have a pretty narrow and boring "lowest common denominator of interesting" site. On a side note, I'm curious the history of "lowest common denominator". Did it start out as a confusion of "least common multiple" and "greatest common divisor/denominator" from mathematics, or was it more purposeful?