And rightly so. If your reaction to his death here was to go into flag-mode and just not let the front page be filled for one day with a story that so clearly affected the community, then I've got no problems with your flag rights being taken away.
It's an odd reaction that's honestly somewhat puzzling.
So every time someone important in the tech world dies its ok that the front page is filled with the same story but different from sources? I don't see why one can't be enough and still have some other topics. There are many stories that clearly affect the community, but you don't see them take up all 30 spots. It's not like the story wouldn't be #1 or go unnoticed.
Though the mass flagging was of course unnecessary, it's not like mods didn't see that every single post was the same thing.
It could be because 99% of the stories were just spammy little tech rags like TechCrunch and the rest of AOL's content farm spewing out as much as they could to cash in on it.
Jobs wasn't a hacker; I don't think he ever saw or portrayed himself as one of us. The appliances he was best known for were (and are) more and more actively hostile to hackers. I don't revel in his absence but it did dial back the biggest current threat to the independence of our profession.
I don't understand why we're saddled with a few hundred people who conspired to kick this community in the nuts for a day and a night as some kind of self-flagellating tribute, but I don't consider them my peers. If I were pg for a day I'd stop counting votes from anyone who upvoted three dozen clones of the same wire story with almost no accompanying discussion.
It's an odd reaction that's honestly somewhat puzzling.