I don't know what you mean by "manipulated" but these flags were, and are, coming from users, not admins. The most likely explanation isn't sinister—it's that readers were fatigued by the tsunami of stories about this saga, and were flagging the ones that didn't seem to contain significant new information (a.k.a. SNI: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
I realize your perception was that all the negative ones got flagged, but this perception is most likely a function of your own preference (you're more likely to notice it when a story that you agree with gets flagged, because people are more likely to notice what they dislike: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Probably Sam feels like all the positive stories are getting flagged :)
I wrote a longer explanation about how we treat story floods like this from a moderation point of view, if anyone wants to read about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38357788.
Edit: and this applies to the OP, which actually does contain SNI. I've turned user flags off on this submission and changed the title to be the article's HTML doc title, which is more specific.
I realize your perception was that all the negative ones got flagged, but this perception is most likely a function of your own preference (you're more likely to notice it when a story that you agree with gets flagged, because people are more likely to notice what they dislike: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Probably Sam feels like all the positive stories are getting flagged :)
I wrote a longer explanation about how we treat story floods like this from a moderation point of view, if anyone wants to read about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38357788.
Edit: and this applies to the OP, which actually does contain SNI. I've turned user flags off on this submission and changed the title to be the article's HTML doc title, which is more specific.