You only see up-votes, not flags. Your statement is completely untrue: > Certainly if it's not interesting to the community, it wouldn't get upvoted enough to

You only see up-votes, not flags. Your statement is completely untrue: > Certainly if it's not interesting to the community, it wouldn't get upvoted enough to make it very far. It could garner enough votes to make it to the front page, then collect enough flags to drop off. The population of users who watch the "new" feed isn't always identical to the population of users who watch the front page.