For example, I've just seen Xinjiang Victims Database flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273507
This is an important project led by a person I know: the author, Gene Bunin, used to be active on tatoeba.org, adding Uyghur sentences. I had a chance to have a lot of conversations with him back then. He self-taught Uyghur and visited Xinjiang in the past, when it was safer to do so, and he is keeping that database because he sincerely cares about Uyghur people.
Why was the submission of his website flagged?
Flagging here works by people clicking on the "flag" button until an unknown threshold is reached and the post is marked as [flagged] and is hidden from everyone who doesn't have "showdead" enabled in their profile. People who disagree can click "vouch" to undo the flagging.
So in general it is not really possible to give a single reason why something was flagged, but in this case I suspect that people thought this post would result in a flamewar instead of an intelligent discussion and flagged it preemptively.
I did see 2 or 3 users who appeared to be flagging stories for political reasons. When we see that, we remove flagging privileges from the account.
"The Deep Weirdness of Beavers" is certainly on topic for HN and we also remove flagging privileges when we see accounts flagging too many submissions like that. Unpredictable-but-interesting submissions are the best things here, not the worst.
By contrast, sensational/indignant posts on politically charged topics are all too predictable, leading to repetitive and eventually nasty discussion. That's mostly why users flag them, and they're mostly right to do so, although there are sometimes exceptions and we sometimes turn off flags on those.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36769469
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36566507
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36487742
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34439883