I'm glad the mods unflagged this, as I do believe there is some interesting discussion here.
Do you see your app as being useful to people researching more philosophical aspects of the Bible? (For instance: I'm atheist to the core, but I'm curious about the impact Stoicism had on the Bible.)
I flagged this submission because I think it has a high potential for not-interesting and unproductive discussion. Others can vouch if I'm wrong, but I don't see a place for an app like this on HN. Product Hunt seems more appropriate.
This is a very loosely held opinion, though I'm not willing to go back and forth on it, and I doubt my flag will change anything one way or another.
Your flag would have contributed, along with others, to lowering the rank of the story and also to the [flagged] marker getting put on it. I don't think flagging was appropriate in this case—the app seems as on-topic as any other, and the fact that the material is religious shouldn't make a difference, although religion is of course a divisive topic and most religious-themed submissions tend to get this treatment from some users.
Religious tolerance has been a prime principle of intellectual culture for many centuries. If you zoom out to a historical perspective, it's clear that it's in all our interests to practice it, regardless of what our religious or irreligious views may be. We don't have to hold the same views to respect each other, and the art of interesting discourse with people who hold different views is something we should all cultivate, assuming that we have the intellectual curiosity that the HN guidelines speak of.
From a different angle: the problem with mobile apps as Show HNs is that they're not easy to try out (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) without going through the rigamarole of installing them. But that's a problem with the entire category, and as long as we haven't disallowed them (which we're not going to), this submission seems as valid as any other.
Was I wrong to rely on the system to prevent my view from having an outsized or misrepresented amount of control here? I figured my vote, along with many others, would decide the fate of the submission, ultimately moderated by you.
I can adjust my behavior if this wasn't the right way to think about it, but I just want to make sure I'm acting as intended with this point of view.
No, in the sense that other users had to do the same thing in order for flags to 'win' over upvotes. Yes, in the sense that your flag probably had more effect than you assumed it would.
I wouldn't say you were super wrong about how the system works or is intended to work! I'd say you and the other flaggers misapplied the site guidelines in this case. You're right that it's moderation's job to correct for such failure modes.
Did you read the HN guidelines? I can vouch that you're wrong. Someone spent time working on an app they care about and has proven by the conversation here to be interesting to the community. If someone wrote an app on a topic you'd be interested in, would you have flagged it?
Please consider that there are varying perspectives on HN beyond your own and that sharing an app which allows people to study the Bible isn't forcing a worldview on anyone.
You serious? The guy/girl is taking on the task of trying to help with understanding of one of the most complex, and well known, books we have as a species! And he/she is trying to do so using technology that most here are familiar with. How in hell (pardon the pun) is this not relevant?
Its a super interesting challenge
Even as someone dismayed by the outsized influence of ancient religion on modern society, I don't think it's fair to flag this. Like it or not, this impacts a lot of people, and developing an app for that audience comes with its own set of interesting UX, curation, funding, etc. considerations.
Even if I don't like the product, it's certainly worth a discussion at least.
The problem is, unless I'm misunderstanding something about HN, they can not vouch until the submission is already dead.
You're not out of bounds to suppose this will have some bad comments, but I do think it's presumptuous to bet there will be no interesting discussion. There in fact has already been both - a lot of interesting discussion, and a little bit of bad comments. I encourage you to flag bad comments while they are still the minority, and only resort to flagging the submission if they take over, since, again, nobody can vouch for the submission until it's dead, at which point there will be fewer people to vouch for it, as it will be hidden.
Edit: Actually, maybe vouch is only for comments, and not for submissions? I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I think my suggestion still makes sense.
I flagged it too. If we take it to the extreme... and I see tons of bible app discussions on Hacker News then I will quickly lose interest in HN. The bible isn't based on facts and contradicts itself many times over.
If everyone flagged every article they found uninteresting, particularly something that rarely comes up here, because they're afraid it will become common on HN, then we'd pretty quickly have a pretty narrow and boring "lowest common denominator of interesting" site.
On a side note, I'm curious the history of "lowest common denominator". Did it start out as a confusion of "least common multiple" and "greatest common divisor/denominator" from mathematics, or was it more purposeful?
