You can't judge this by individual datapoints that you disagree with. To answer your question, imagine HN's frontpage saturated by stories that you would consi

You can't judge this by individual datapoints that you disagree with. To answer your question, imagine HN's frontpage saturated by stories that you would consider entirely offtopic and sensational. To a first approximation, that's what HN would be for everyone if it weren't for user flags. Of course the system is imperfect and overcorrects. But the presence of the current post on the frontpage already shows that sometimes—often, in fact—the overcorrection gets adjusted.