Transparency would be nice. If tptacek downvoted/flagged anything I submitted, yet others loved them, I might wait until he was offline until I posted something. (apologies for using him as an example!)
I flag things where I can't imagine anything but pointless bickering going on. If I want to comment, and what I want to say sounds to me like "you asshat!" then I do a double-check to make sure the content belongs here. If I click through to comments and the thread is basically full of people saying "I believe X, and those that don't are obviously asshats" then I know it needs a flag.
Flagging isn't that I don't like it. It's that it hurts the site. I've flagged highly emotional pieces I agreed with. To me it's the effect on the site that should trigger a flag, not whether I like it or not. I already have voting for that.
See, that I would leave to the moderators, and to the flame war detector, rather than applying my personal opinion of "I don't like this discussion" and thereby downvoting a story by 10 points.
I flag things where I can't imagine anything but pointless bickering going on. If I want to comment, and what I want to say sounds to me like "you asshat!" then I do a double-check to make sure the content belongs here. If I click through to comments and the thread is basically full of people saying "I believe X, and those that don't are obviously asshats" then I know it needs a flag.
Flagging isn't that I don't like it. It's that it hurts the site. I've flagged highly emotional pieces I agreed with. To me it's the effect on the site that should trigger a flag, not whether I like it or not. I already have voting for that.