I’m an admin on most of these sites, so any flag I make is a hammer. But I also like that other people in the community can hide spam right away, or trigger the poster to edit an offensive post rather than letting the conversation inflame.
Having a default option to just trigger moderators attention would be very helpful in many cases. Sometimes, trolls are very happy to trigger an auto-hide flag and it only motivates them to do more harm. Other times, moderators are very happy to trigger other moderators attention to discuss something. Whispers could be used, but it’s a different feature, not necessarily available to a dedicated moderator group that has no “moderator” status in Discourse.
And this.