tomhow

I don't find any instances of dang (or me) referring to “frivolous flagging”. That's certainly not a term or concept we think about.

Flags are disabled after a user exhibits a continuing pattern of flagging items for reasons other than guidelines breaches; most commonly for political reasons. That's not “frivolous”, but it is most certainly a mis-use of the flag feature.

There are cases where an exception to the “If you flag, please don't also comment that you did” rule is warranted, but it needs to carry the substance and energy of an earnest, helpful contribution to the discussion. The comment I replied to seemed much more snarky than earnest.

I think it's a fairly solid rule of thumb that almost any comment made earnestly will be okay here.

[stub for offtopicness]

The convention over the two decades of HN has been to reserve the black bar for eminent contributors to computer science and technology entrepreneurship. That's not at all to diminish the merit of people from other fields. Debates about the black bar are unseemly, so let's leave it here please.

> For a website focused on the latest and most sophisticated tech

That's not really what we are :) It's part of what we talk about, sure, but mostly we're a site for curious conversation.

We actually don't want to automate things in ways that seem “polished” and “perfect” all the time. Which individual or software system would we want to be the arbiter of that? We like that the software does a rough approximation in cases like these, then through collaboration between the community and the moderators we arrive the best outcome in the end.

Fixed, thanks!

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

Thanks for understanding. I should have read the comments more closely and normally do, but I was on the defensive after the comment seemed to accuse us of killing comments, or at least make assumptions that we did or would do that.