Flags are sufficient. I just posted a comment on the comment you linked to: I have many times been the person who pressed "flag" on a story and then watched it immediately disappear.
I think there's some threshold of flags to upvotes and possibly some other metrics that determines whether a story vanishes, but flags can absolutely tip the scales.
It's not flags (or not sufficient to remove the story):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055
Flags are sufficient. I just posted a comment on the comment you linked to: I have many times been the person who pressed "flag" on a story and then watched it immediately disappear.
I think there's some threshold of flags to upvotes and possibly some other metrics that determines whether a story vanishes, but flags can absolutely tip the scales.