Thanks for the replies folks!
@Roman, we haven’t tried changing hide_post_sensitivity because we’re happy with how many non-admin/moderator flags it takes to hide a post (and raising the threshold would mean bad posts getting hidden slower). This suggestion was inspired by that setting, as a similar knob to adjust on the auto-hiding behavior.
@sam, yeah, this does come down to making it more configurable how much trust to put in moderators. Our situation is that we’re a fiercely democratic organization, arriving in large numbers onto our Discourse forum from some frankly-toxic mailing lists, and requiring at least two moderators to weigh in on decisions has been really helpful to avoid escalating conflicts, and give us more of a mandate from community members to moderate. I can imagine some other forums in similar positions, but I have no idea how many, and if this seems too far away from the goals of core then I’m happy to put in the work to make a plugin instead.
Do you have any preferences as to how those hooks would work, if so (I haven’t done anything with hooks so far)? I see the :reviewable_score_updated hook in app/models/reviewable.rb – maybe a :reviewable_user_score_calculated hook in ReviewableScore.user_flag_score?