Not sure about tomhow, but dang (and sama before him) commented on this many times, it's called "flamewar detector" if you want to search. Here is the first link I've found: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232311 (here he does not say it's flagged, just demoted so I might be misremembering, but I am pretty sure I read that it can flag too).

That's as I remember, flame war and rapid short volatile exchange detection leading to down ranking weighting .. I had the impression that explicit [flagging] was the visible mechanism for explicit core user disapproval (for inclusion, not necessarily of specific content) and kept separate from the invisible hand of algorithmic weights.

The repeated takeaway I see is that they are still open for discussion on aspects of all that:- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39233617