Comment by dang

If my point didn't make sense, it may be because I compressed it too much. Here's some background information followed by a decompressed version of that specific point.

The optimal HN front page is not one consisting of stories that the strongest-feeling subsets of users feel strongest about. That would optimize for indignation and sensationalism—definitely incompatible with HN's mandate.

The tug-of-war between upvotes and flags is core to HN's functioning. Indignant and/or sensational stories are often propelled onto the frontpage by 'hot' upvotes and then demoted by 'cold' flags. For the most part, that's the system working as intended. Not having flags at all, which is (I think?) what you're arguing for, would definitely not be in the interests of the site.

There's unfortunately* still a need for moderation, though, because some stories stay on the front page even though they're not so good (I mean 'good' in the specific sense of 'in keeping with the site mandate), and some stories get flagged off the front page even though they are legit submissions that could produce good-for-HN threads.

Now here's a decompressed version of the point you quoted:

If it were a rare thing for a topic to get flagged even though some users care strongly about it, we could just turn off the flags whenever that happened. However, there are always topics going on that some users care strongly about, which other users want to flag. To unflag all of them would (practically) amount to not having flags at all, and that's not an option. Therefore, there needs to be some way of deciding which ones to unflag vs. to leave flagged; and the argument for this cannot just be "please turn off the flags because I really care about this story"—that would be treating one subset of users more favorably than others. Similarly, it can't be "let's turn off the flags because we (the mods) personally care about the story". There needs to be an argument from principle about why a given story is a good candidate for turning off flags (or not turning off flags). If people want to argue that about a particular story, then, they need to either show how (1) this is desirable given HN's principles as I've explained them; or (2) there could be different principles that are better at realizing the site mandate. Does that make more sense now?

* unfortunately, because it would be so much less work if there weren't!