The 17th story about the country sliding into autocracy is not "evidence of some interesting phenomenon". It may have been interesting for the first story. Le

The 17th story about the country sliding into autocracy is not "evidence of some interesting phenomenon". It may have been interesting for the first story. Less so for the second. By now? Not interesting (in the HN sense). And, it's not the moderators, or at least not mostly. It's the users who are flagging stories, because the users have seen them turn into flamefests too often. In fact, the moderators (at least sometimes) rescue such stories from the user flags.