One reason we tend to flag down meta drama like this is that, for the most part, people on HN don't have a good mental model of how moderation works here. This is a good example; it can bother you that people flag stories, but everyone over the (low) karma threshold can flag anything --- if you do it abusively, you can quietly lose your flag powers, is my understanding, but that's it. It's not a conspiracy.

I flagged this post, just to be clear: it's drama about drama. There was an excellent post yesterday that was critical of Paul Graham: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25325716