Yes, because if an article is particularly good, it's not fair for disgruntled users to be able to sink it by posting shitty comments. That would be a big loophole.

If the article were garden-variety flamebait then it would be a different story (no pun intended) – but this was such a clear case of the opposite.

The best thing is to give us a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com. That could be either "hey, there's a really good article getting unfairly flagged" (a user did that last night and it was extremely helpful) or it could be "hey, there's a really good article getting a lot of flamewar comments". Actually it could also simply be "hey, there's a really good article that hasn't gotten any attention yet". (People often send those for their own articles, but that's a little less noble and not what I'm talking about here.)

You can see the common denominator there: "a really good article". There aren't very many of those. Just as the most important thing for startup investors is not to miss the best startups, the most important thing for HN is not to miss the best articles.

Thanks for answering. Not being able to use the flag feature when a article is being used as fuel for culture war is an answer to the question I had. Emailing sounds like a useful feature through I doubt I will be using it myself. What I find as being an really good article getting unfairly flagged might be very different from others.

A standard version that I often see is when articles get sunk by shitty comments are when the author is controversial. The negative comments are focusing on the author, and often that dominated the article comments until the article get flagged to death. Fair? No. It is however a pattern that keep repeating itself.

Yes, that's a problem. It requires human intervention to fix it, and that inevitably includes interpretation and judgment calls and no doubt bias too. We try to be as unprejudiced as we can and stick to HN's first principles, but people have such vastly different perspectives that satisfying everyone is out of the question. Still, it's not entirely subjective, and one's ability to stick to first principles gets better with practice.

I don't recognize this bit though: "Not being able to use the flag feature when a article is being used as fuel for culture war". That doesn't sound like what I said and certainly isn't what I meant. Edit: oh, I see what you mean - "being used as fuel for culture war" is your rephrasing of what I described as "shitty comments". Don't take this absolutely, though. The median case is that both the article and the comments are garden-variety culture war; those are legit to flag. I'm just saying that you shouldn't flag indiscriminately. We want some discernment when an article clears, let's say, the 95th percentile of thoughtfulness.

There are separate flags for comments and articles. At the time of erroneous article flagging, there were worthwhile comments on this article.

The important question is when the flagging occurred by the users. If the flagging occured when most comments were culture warring, and the moderators find that to be inappropriate, then it would be good to know for future reference. If most users pressed the flag button long after the discussion switched to be more productive then I can understand what dang is talking about, but from his post I can't determine that.

Is there a documented HN policy that high-quality articles can be censored on HN because of low-quality comments? Why not allow time for low-quality comments to be downvoted/flagged and high-quality comments to arrive? If good articles could be rapidly flagged/censored, how could discussions ever "switch to be more productive"?