Yes, flagging mechanism on HN is evil.

I have showdead on, and almost every single flagged post I've seen definitely deserves it. Every time it wasn't "deserved", the person simply took an overly aggressive tone for no real reason.

In short, I've never seen somebody flagged simply for having the wrong opinion. Even controversial opinions tend to stay unflagged, unless they're incredibly dangerous or unhinged.

I've seen a few dead posts where there was an innocent misunderstanding or wrong assumption. In those cases it would have been beneficial to keep the post visible and post a response, so that readers with similarly mistaken assumptions could have seen a correction. Small minority of dead posts though. They can be vouched for actually but of course this is unlikely to happen.

I agree that most dead posts would be a distraction and good to have been kept out.

It’s a blunt tool, but quite useful for posts. I read most dead posts I come across and I don’t think I ever saw one that was not obviously in violation of several guidelines.

OTOH I don’t like flagging stories because good ones get buried regularly. But then HN is not a great place for peaceful, nuanced discussion and these threads often descend into mindless flame wars, which would bury the stories even without flagging.

So, meh. I think flagging is a moderately good thing overall but it really lacks in subtlety.

Agreed, flagging for comments seems to function pretty well for the most part, and the vouch option provided a recourse for those that shouldn't have been killed.

On stories however, I think the flag system is pretty broken. I've seen so many stories that get flagged because people find them annoying (especially AI-related things) or people assume it will turn into a flame war, but it ends up burying important tech news. Even if the flags are reversed, the damage is usually done because the story fell off the front page (or further) and gets very little traction after that.

Just imagine this comment of yours would get flagged. Was it something very valuable and now the discussion is lacking something important? Surely not, but how would you feel? So what that you have some not so mild and not so "pleasant" opinion on something - why flag the comment? Just let people downvote it!