It's more a question of the article. What we're looking for includes: is the article not too repetitive of recent discussions? does it contain significant new information? is there a reasonable chance that it could support a substantive, thoughtful discussion, or is it too flamebaity/provocative? that kind of thing.
Can you tell if there's a concerted effort to flag Musk and DOGE related threads? I've seen threads go from nothing to [flagged][dead] in the course of 30 seconds after being up for 40 minutes, suggesting very spiky flagging behavior. This has come up a few times recently, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904148
(Of course, I could just be misunderstanding how flagging works on the site... maybe the state machine has to transition in order from regular -> [flagged][dead] -> [flagged] after vouching?)
I haven't looked specifically at DOGE stories but from my general perspective, this is the same as what we see with all the hottest/most divisive topics—that is, it's the same with Musk in general, Trump in general, and Israel/Gaza, to name perhaps the 3 most in-that-category topics.
You can also email moderators at hn@ycombintor.com to request unflagging. I do that occasionally, with mixed results. (I've come to know which are long shots, and typically concede the point, but at least make the attempt.)
If you use the vouch feature much, eventually they take it away from you. Same with upvoting and downvoting, but it all happens silently so most people don't notice.
I didn't see much misuse of vouching in your recent history so I've removed that penalty from your account now. But please make sure that the comments you're vouching for are respecting the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Because I'm scared of how much extra work it would create, and because it's the sort of frog-boiling bureaucratism that it is in the spirit of this site to avoid. It's easy for me to imagine that one day I would wake up and be horrified by the systems we had inadvertently let sprout up around ourselves.
HN works best with informal systems, not formal ones. The informal contract around transparency is: people are welcome to ask questions and we always answer them, but we don't formally publish a moderation log or anything like that (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
> I call it frog-boiling because it's easy for me to imagine that one day I would wake up and be horrified by the systems we had inadvertently let spring up around ourselves.
You're already removing the ability of users to vouch. That frog is boiled.
I'm saying tell them on their user page. Include a line that only they can see which says "can no longer vouch" or similar. That way they know what's happened instead of having to guess what's happened.
