"Yeah, I have one of these. I'm Bill Gates."

Fanboys and haters flagging this HN article is more priceless to me.

Grow up guys, you can upvote your Apple and Google posts all you want, you don't need to go out of your way to flag this post out of spite and abuse your moderator privileges.

If I could go a week without someone on HN using the word "fanboy" I'd be a happy man.

Yet, you seem to be okay with the folks who flag this story.

What do you call people who go out of their way to flag even product announcements and posts like this? Tech enthusiasts? I'll be happy to use a less abrasive substitute.

No, I think that's pretty lame too.

I'm guessing he intended to mean it would be nice if there was a week without necessity for the word, rather than the word itself being entirely bad (it's over-used, but I agree in this instance it was apt).

Forgive my ignorance. How do you know people are flagging the story?

how do you know it was flagged?

It has 222 points and is at #17, far below other posts posted longer ago and with less points. This is an indication of heavy flagging.

http://i.imgur.com/hFFueFf.png

This isn't the first time anyway. Pretty much any post mentioning Microsoft in a not bad light seems to get flagged by people with good karma abusing it.

Edit: It's at 325 points(posted 4 hours ago) right now and stuck at #14. Has to break some record for the most upvoted and flagged story.

I think some sites have a bonus point degrader applied to them, so they age off faster. Prevents what may otherwise be popular sites from dominating the front page.

I should hope so. I didn't flag this (as robber baron parasites go, Gates is pretty interesting and topical) but #1 on the Reddit front page isn't exactly obscure.

As far as I know, there is nothing of that sort on HN. If you know more or can list sites that have the degrader applied to them, I'll be thankful.

Looks like even mentioning the flagging is taboo. My top level comment on this story[1] calling out the flagging is sitting at the bottom of the comment pile, very grayed out.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5203191

Or people just decided to downvote it because they felt it didn't add anything. shrug

Flagging on HN isn't really the same as downvoting on Reddit.

From the HN guidelines:

If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)

I think 27182818284 is talking about the downvoting of your comment, not the flagging of the original story.

Also, Reddit has the same guideline as you quote (only downvote things that don't belong) whereas HN has the creator saying that downvotes can be used to express disagreement.