People have already mentioned the guidelines but I will only add it just takes 4 people to click flag to get something flagged. No site moderator required. Th

People have already mentioned the guidelines but I will only add it just takes 4 people to click flag to get something flagged. No site moderator required. The site is community moderated by anyone with a karma higher than 499. Someone can click vouch for a period of time and it may conditionally be un-flagged, but then it can get flagged again. Either way if it was flagged even once it will fall off the main page. A site moderator can bump it back to the main page. There is no way to definitively answer your question because flags do not require a "reason". Some take off and some do not. Political leanings play a big part of which direction they go based on my experience. Political discussions would be better served on a site or forum dedicated to such things and I say that having submitted articles that are both technical and political. Some externally documented HN features: [1] not my repo [1] - https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented