I read the article in the submission, and I‘m just curious why it was flagged? Maybe I don’t understand flagging in general, but the submission seemed pretty relevant for HN, objectively speaking. What am I missing?
Users flagged it. This is the usual tug of war between upvotes, flags, and vouches.
We sometimes turn off flags if the article is substantive and we feel like it can support a thoughtful discussion. In this case, I'm wavering. I'm not sure how significant this information really is, given how many such things are happening right now (lots of moderation thoughts on that at [1] and [2]). The question is whether the resulting thread would be significantly different from previous discussions or not, or whether it would just get sucked into the nearest black hole, i.e. the nearest flamewar topic.
Wavering isn't a strong enough reason to override the community verdict so I guess we'll leave it as is. Sorry to disappoint—there's lots of room for disagreement about this stuff, and lots of interpretation involved. I'm not saying we're right, and certainly not always right, but someone has to make these calls.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20informa...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...
I got the submission in my RSS reader (Feedly) which regularly shows me posts that end up getting flagged for removal. After seeing the linked article elsewhere, this seemed like an odd submission to remove.