No doubt that's true but if you're saying something specific about HN, I'd like to know what it is. Also, the word 'censorship' is too vague now. People just use it about whatever they disagree with. So if you have a specific question, it would also be good to use more precise language.
You guys need to realize that you have a trump card (can I say that? or too soon?) that users of other platforms don't have: direct access to the people running the platform, who are willing to answer any question about it.
Why not automatically punish users that abuse flagging to censor stories (e.g. users start with 100%, each flagging that’s removed decrease their flag-weight with 50%, so 3 wrong flags means 100->50->25-12.5%, and similarly, correct flags increase by 50%, and stories where mods haven’t accepted/rejected the flag will have no impact)? This way good actors that flag blog-spam and whatnot will not be impacted, whereas bad actors/nationalists will quickly lose their ability to abuse this moderation/censorship tool (which is clearly being abused to a degree where your manual intervention, if any, doesn’t cut it).
Why even allow flagging to influence a submission’s ranking without mod intervention in the first place? Spammy links won’t reach the frontpage anyway (although they sometimes stay on Show HN for a while, so can make special exceptions for Show/Ask submissions).
And how about if a user flag a post, then you might consider making the post completely inaccessible to said user (and if they posted a comment in the submission then set their flag weight to 0 for said submission)? After all, good actors will have no interest in engaging in the submissions they flagged, whereas bad actors will want to attack the submission from all angles (flag submission, downvote comments, post own comments).
It's a good question, in that it brings out the fundamental issue with these discussions.
> Why not automatically punish users that abuse flagging to censor stories
The problem is with the words "abuse" and "censor". No one can agree on what they mean because it depends on what you think of the underlying story, and when it comes to divisive topics, people have strongly differing views on that.
When the topics aren't so divisive (e.g. Conway's Game of Life on the GPU, or something like that), this is not such a thorny problem. But those aren't the cases that we're talking about in this thread.
You guys need to realize that you have a trump card (can I say that? or too soon?) that users of other platforms don't have: direct access to the people running the platform, who are willing to answer any question about it.