You only have that luxury because of the tireless effort we put in to preserving the bulk of HN for its intended purpose. The /active page doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of HN; it's a product of it. It depends entirely on a balance that by no means just-happens, but is meticulously and carefully tended to. If we didn't do that, there would be no "organic tech forum" for you to be enjoying, because the site would have been consumed by flames a long time ago.
Moderators add flags sometimes, but almost never on submissions. (It's different with comments.) See "What does [flagged] mean?" in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
