Sure, but the fact that one thing gets one kind of reception but another thing gets another tells you little since HN is not a monolith. Different people read different things, have different thresholds for flagging stuff, so on and so forth.
> You haven't explained why this is flagged.
My comment was not an attempt to explain why the post was flagged in the first place?
It's not like I can give a definitive reason for its flagging either, since a) I don't know the precise manner in which HN's software determines whether something is flagged or not, b) I can't read the minds of everyone who flagged the article, let alone try to determine whether their reason for flagging was "valid" (assuming I'm even qualified to make that determination), and c) I have no idea if the moderators manually flagged this article. I can make guesses, sure, but it's not like my guesses would be worth any more than yours.
If you see something is flagged and think it should not be, the best way to try to resolve the issue is to either vouch for it, or if that doesn't work, email the moderators.
If you're not trying to explain why this thing is flagged, or at least why it isn't flagged, idk why you are in this thread. But it's all good.
Based on this [0] (and a few other random comments search engines pulled up) the points threshold for vouching is supposedly 31. It does appear that I misunderstood the vouching functionality, though, since apparently it's supposed to counteract [dead] posts, not [flagged]. My mistake!
> The rules about how many points are required to do things seem to promote a hive mind phenomenon.
As with many things, it's a tradeoff. Having a points threshold also makes it harder to abuse new accounts to manipulate flags/votes/etc., so there's no free lunch here.
> If you're not trying to explain why this thing is flagged, or at least why it isn't flagged, idk why you are in this thread.
My intent was very specifically to push back against the claim that Rust criticism is a surefire way to get downvoted/flagged. The tl;dr is that good criticism of Rust is well-received, and this article is not a good critique and so it's not all that surprising that it was not well-received.
[0]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
