Stories receive upvotes and reach the front page. Certain topics then tend to be aggressively flagged and vanish off the front page no matter how many upvotes they have.
I don't see an issue with that. There are other venues for discussing certain things. This isn't to say that these topics are bad, just that at the time, they really don't belong here.
> So a minority of users can remove stories the majority wants to see.
You mean, they want to see it here. And that's the problem. Just because a majority want to see it doesn't mean it should be seen here. And yes, a minority of users who've proven themselves over the years to understand the difference between on-topic and off-topic should have some power of this process.
HN is curated, and it's not just curated by the majority. And me, and many others are fine with that. It's what makes HN the way it is. Removing that effectively turns HN into Reddit.
Minor correction, most users don't upvote so a small minority of users can remove stories an even smaller minority of users wants to see. Sounds like spam filtering.
Too many users are unable to make the distinction between agreeing with a story or feeling its interesting, and correctly evaluating its worth further examination and discussion. On the other hand the flaggers are pretty good at detecting stuff where the discussion will be useless.
Example: "Obama is the best president". Well that's going to get upvotes from people who like 'bama and want to tell everyone even though no one wants to hear it, who hate 'bama and want to tell everyone even though no one wants to hear it, people who think they should be more politically active so they don't personally care but in a misguided way think they're doing a public service by upvoting something thats widely agreed as a public good even though it isn't, and people who just like to watch the world burn... But lets face it, the comments are going to be garbage sloganeering at absolute best from both sides, so it get flagged as it should be.
Here's a live example from HN new which I don't think is going to make it under the above criteria:
"Ask HN: How are social media user habits changing?"
Is there anything actually useful to comment about this that hasn't been hashed to death already or is just an anecdote or bragging about how I deleted my facebook in 2009 so I'm more 'leet than the guys who deleted in 2010?
I theorize a meta poll of "is there anything interesting to talk about in social media that hasn't been talked about?" would probably come up 95% against. Maybe the poll comments would actually contain something interesting, maybe even from the 5% who think there might exist something interesting but may or may not be able to enumerate it, but I don't expect that to happen.
