Mods can unflag a story if they deem it important, high quality, giving new information etc. Also "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less

Mods can unflag a story if they deem it important, high quality, giving new information etc. Also "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Perhaps users saw the quality of the comments and chose to flag, or perhaps they saw the quality of the submission. I also think there's an auto-flag mechanism that kicks in automatically. I don't know how that works, but I'm guessing if I was to write one it would detect patterns of downvotes in comments, number of users who upvoted the submission vs number of comments, and the use of negative and emotional language.