I was looking over my flags and I noticed two of these flags were declined:
If you find the post, the answers have since been deleted. Is this why they were declined? Or is it something else?
Oh boy, the Futurama event.
Both of these answers had several flags, some “very low quality” and some “not an answer”. Neither had any comments. Neither had any downvotes (Shawn's had one by the time it was deleted — mine).
I think I agree with “very low quality”, but it's not at all obvious that they are “not an answer”. They offer very convoluted explanations, but with Futurama, the correct answer is also usually pretty convoluted.
If you flag a post that looks like it may plausibly be an answer, you need to say more than just “not an answer”. On, say, a Star Trek question, it's possible to tell a joke answer from a plausible-looking answer, even if you aren't familiar with the material. On a Futurama question, it's not possible. So please leave a few words to say that the answer is completely made up, either in a comment or in your flag.
Also, downvote. Completely wrong answers are supposed to be downvoted, not deleted. Noise answers are supposed to be deleted. When distinguishing noise answers from wrong answers is difficult, remember that the moderator may be unfamiliar with the work being discussed: give us enough information to confirm that this is indeed a noise answer.
I know your flags were VLQ and not NaA. We can't dismiss flags separately, we have to pick a reason that applies to all the flags. So the VLQ flags got caught up with the NaA flags. VLQ is a difficult flag to handle anyway: what's a moderator supposed to do about that? There's been talk of doing away with VLQ flags on the main Meta, it has neither been done nor declined as far as I remember. So please avoid VLQ¹ and instead use a custom flag reason to indicate what you want moderators to do with the post and why.
Declined flags aren't a slap on the face, they aren't even a slap on the wrist. They're the way a moderator can provide feedback on the flag to tell you that sorry, but we can't do what you asked us to do, or we disagree with this particular case. Don't sweat it. A declined flag is just that, there's no penalty attached.²
¹ On Stack Overflow, VLQ is useful because it's a canned flag, and canned flag are seen by users with 10k reputation and they can take action on the flagged post. With thousands of flags per day, having the community take care of as much of them as possible is important. On this site, moderators can handle all the flags anyway, so don't refrain from using custom reasons.
² If you have a lot of flags declined — and by a lot, I mean consistently more declined than helpful for a while, your flags may end up being ignored. You're likely to receive a moderator message first, asking you to use flags more carefully. This has never happened on this site so far, not even close.