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Ask HN: More types of flagging?

• gregwebs 17y ago
  I would like to be able flag a story as not a primary source/not the best source and give an alternative. Not sure if this will help the dicussions, but I think that a discussion tends to only get as good relative to the story. Often times the most helpful comments are ones which give alternative sources, so it might be good to think about supporting that.
• mixmax 17y ago
  Have you considered downvotes for submissions? Maybe with a Karma threshold, so that it'll only be used to get irrelevant submissions off the front page.
  • oscardelben 17y ago
    One possible problem with this is that you can downvote everyone except your story of course.
    • swombat 17y ago
      That's easily caught by a script... Also, if downvoting is limited to high-karma people, the chance that they would actually do this is fairly low.
  • pg 17y ago
    Flagging seems better for that, because if they're really offtopic they should be killed, not just have fewer points.
    • swombat 17y ago
      I guess the trade-off there is between a purely binary action (kill / don't kill) which depends on a moderator's opinion, versus a softer, more gradual action of slowly pushing a story down and letting more worthy stories rise to the top...
• tptacek 17y ago
  This idea didn't work for Slashdot at all.
  • pg 17y ago
    What went wrong for them?
    • jordyhoyt 17y ago
      I think what went wrong was that they publicly displayed the score for whichever axis was most significant. Here, the only score that is displayed to all is the only positive one we have: "this comment adds to the discussion." The reason I think this is what went wrong for them was that they had flags like "funny", for things that obviously don't add to the discussion, and too many choices for the other positive votes. IMHO, having one meaning for upvote and a handful of negative flags would be ideal if the flags were only visible to the submitter (to educate noobs/reprimand those who should know better) and whatever process is responsible for threshing the chaff.
      • tptacek 17y ago
        This is a good point. "Uncivil" is more valuable than "Offtopic" and "Troll".
        • ericb 17y ago
          The Uncivil tag should prove a fun exercise in reading tone and sarcasm from text. Someone needs to invent Tone Markup Language--and not just emoticons.
        • TeHCrAzY 17y ago
          The "Troll" tag on Slashdot comes with some sense of acheivement. "Uncivil" seems much more refined, and less likely to award poor behaviour.
        • fragmede 17y ago
          How about adding a free form tagging field to the flag process? Don't show all tags on a post, just a given subset (most common and not blacklisted).
• swombat 17y ago
  The comment flags is a great idea - there's a good chance that it would cut down on "why am I being downvoted" types of posts, which would in turn reduce noise. Are you thinking of adding more flags to stories too?
  • pg 17y ago
    I should probably add a way to flag a story specifically as a dupe, and maybe also for having had the title reworded too egregiously. Those are common problems people currently have to use comments for now. Can anyone think of others?
    • thorax 17y ago
      I pretty much only flag posts for: dupe terrible-title spam-site not-even-arguably-hacker-related
    • brk 17y ago
      Along the same lines, I'd like to see a throttle that limits how many stories a user can submit from the same domain. There are a handful of users that seem to only submit from 1 or 2 sites that (I presume) they are affiliated with. This is just more noise that makes skimming the /new page and promoting good stories less efficient than it could be. Regarding titles... What about a title/subtitle option? Keep whatever title the actual article has, and a slightly smaller subtitle where the submitter can editorialize.
      • dhimes 17y ago
        I dunno. I tend to submit from the same domains simply because there aren't very many submitting from those domains, and the can have interesting articles. On the other hand, I don't submit very often, so maybe some sort of statistical time check would work.
        • brk 17y ago
          Looking at your submissions, there seems to be enough time between submissions and variety that I don't think you'd get "caught" by what I am proposing.
• Tichy 17y ago
  I prefer to use my brain for absorbing news here, not for mastering popularity games. With more ranking options, HN would start to look like work.
• DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  I think this is a good idea and long overdue. Ideally the system will train new users. It has been difficult in the past for me to figure out exactly what downvotes meant. Over the last few months I'm seeing a rise in ad-hominem attacks. No matter what the subject of the article, technology, startups, history, whatever -- it seems like within minutes somebody has called the author's reputation or the news source into question. Sometimes the information is pertinent, but most always it's just an effort to look superior and/or take easy shots at people. If I remember correctly, we've even had posts about "check out my startup" where the founders were trashed, not to mention the nastiness with Dennis a while back. I don't think downvoting is sinking in with the people who are doing this. As much as most people don't understand ad-hominem attacks, it'd still be good to have that flag, because it's the same old discussion every time. EDIT: I meant Dustin, not Dennis. Sorry about that Dustin.
  • pg 17y ago
    Yeah, I've noticed a decline in the tone of comments too. The site seems to be getting nastier. I occasionally find myself thinking lately that I just don't want to be here anymore. But I am determined not to let HN go down without a fight. If anyone has any more general suggestions for solving the nastiness problem, besides these new types of flag, I'm all ears.
    • jsomers 17y ago
      I like this idea of being able to hide comments and stories from submitters with accounts fewer than N days old, where N is a setting that each user can tweak.
      • jurjenh 17y ago
        This can omit important discussion, as I do remember a couple of items discussing either an article or a new site where the author specifically created an account so they could contribute to the discussion. Account age has no bearing on the intelligence of the owner... there's a specific group of smart people (6 degrees of PG) that have been here a long time, and the rest have joined as it came up on their radar.
• m0th87 17y ago
  How about having tags, and then letting the community dynamically decide which ones are standard? I think this would work because the community is fairly observant of the rules. Plus you could shape behavior by suggesting certain tags when the user wants to add a new tag to a submission. On top of covering the use cases you detail, it would: 1) Help with search if it is ever implemented 2) Allow users to quickly disseminate the subject of articles on the front page without ever opening them (especially helpful for ambiguous titles) 3) Maybe in the future allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe to certain tags if the front page starts getting too busy
  • pg 17y ago
    Hmm, interesting. The problem though is that these tags are supposed to be private, so there would be no force to make customs converge.
    • rms 17y ago
      I think m0th87 was suggesting general, public tagging, which always sounds like a good idea but is really hard to implement well.
    • fragmede 17y ago
      Have good tags (common, not blacklisted, thresholded) not be private and pre-seed list of tags. Have a karma threshold to see tags? Would talking about an article's tag be verboten in the article's comment, or just deserve a 'meta' tag? I could see an article's comments being a force for custom convergence.
• thorax 17y ago
  The only oddity for a feature like that is that it's a bit like "judging" their comment. I don't know how to explain it, but I'd almost rather the flag options be worded as "Sorry, this comment seems: uncivil" or "Sorry, this comment seems: off-topic" to lighten it a bit. If they were a friend in real life, I'd take them aside and say "hey man, that comment was great, but you might want to soften the tone. It kind of came across as rude." Downvotes end up being seen as judgments of your ideas, and I would love to be able to provide better feedback. This would be great if this could somehow give the user a nudge that they wouldn't feel defensive about. It may seem like a minor point, but I feel a little guidance would go a long way in helping users get the sort of social cues they already get in a real-life conversation. Edit: Instead of calling it out as flagging, I'd be okay with a downvote system that simply/optionally let you specify a reason to provide (with 3-4 common nicely-worded options). I don't care about upvote reasons at all.
  • pg 17y ago
    What if the incivility flag actually included a message, so you could literally say what you're suggesting? What if it was, in effect, an anonymous comment that had no reply link and was only visible to the submitter of the parent comment?
    • thorax 17y ago
      That would work great for my part-- I'd assume moderators/admins could see it, too. I'd hate for people to abuse the anonymous nature of it sometimes and be rude-- we haven't had any "private" messaging so far on HN, so this would open a little of that world for moderators to think about.
      • tokenadult 17y ago
        I'd assume moderators/admins could see it, too. Yes, it would definitely be a good idea, if private comments attached to flags are implemented, to say explicitly that moderators/curators are allowed to view all of them.
    • nudded 17y ago
• philwelch 17y ago
  If you're going to have flagging options on comments for uncivil or frivolous comments, you should probably raise the moderation floor to -1 or 0, because it doesn't seem fair to let people be downvoted below that point for disagreement alone.
  • pg 17y ago
    Yes, that is a related problem. The floor used to be -8, but as the number of users increased (and maybe the median user got meaner) there started to be lots of comparatively earnest posts that got downvoted to -8. So I raised the cutoff to -4, but that still seems unsatisfactory. Voting still feels like it's being done by a mob. I tried not displaying points on comments a while ago, in order to solve this problem, but users complained that this made HN harder to read because they couldn't pick out the good comments. I only gave it two days' trial though. Maybe I should have given it more time. Or maybe there is some other solution. Anyone have any ideas?
    • weaksauce 17y ago
      Have you thought about showing the aggregate number of flags too? This might be interesting if you have multiple types of flags. Another possibility is to make the flag threshold higher but make the flags non anonymous(That might create a hostile environment though, e.g. tit-for-tat retaliation but I would hope this environment is mature enough for a frank discussion.)
    • awwx 17y ago
      Allow people to turn on seeing the points if they want to, but give more weight to votes by people who aren't choosing to see the points?
    • derefr 17y ago
      It's a bandwagon problem. When people see a large number (positive or negative), they want to push it larger. To snap people out of this heuristic and make them actually judge the comment, I'd suggest making people do a small amount of "work" if the number is already large in either direction (and they're trying to push it larger.) Perhaps make them enter a CAPTCHA of lg(abs(score)) characters?
• scorxn 17y ago
  If public meta-commenting is the issue, and assuming the comment isn't an outright troll, it'd be nice to know who took issue with it, and be able to ask why privately. Hence, civil discourse as though we're face-to-face. Anonymous one-word stamps are no more sensitive than unexplained downvotes, and will give rise to the exact same questions.
• gojomo 17y ago
  The number one kind of alternate flag I'd like is 'review headline' rather than 'kill'. There are many stories that would be OK, if they didn't have a misleading headline.
  • ricree 17y ago
    Or "review link" for that matter. It isn't all that uncommon to have an interesting story that links to a page that is just repeating content from a better and more complete source.
    • cwan 17y ago
      The solution is just to flag these and post the better link since you can't change the link after the fact which makes sense. I'm sometimes guilty of this though sometimes I do think there is editorial content which adds to the original story.
      • gojomo 17y ago
        Moderators can update the headline and link; fixing in place can be better than another submission on the same topic, because it aggregates upvotes and conversation in a single place.
        • cwan 17y ago
          Given how rarely it happens (though it does happen) and the volume of links, I suspect there just aren't enough moderators. It might therefore be more ideal to give the community the tools to enforce.
          • jimmybot 17y ago
            Okay, so why not have something that submits "better link and headline" and that can be voted up? Pass a threshold and the original headline and link get swapped out.
  • 17y ago
• gojomo 17y ago
  For handling individual comments, I think the better system would be to have two-dimensional comment rating. One dimension, upvote/downvote, is "valuable contribution/not-valuable contribution". A second dimension, agree/disagree, allows expressing support or dissent without the connotation of reward/censure that upvote/downvote has. Agree/disagree would only be tallied inline at the comment for reference -- there's no persistent reward for simply saying things many people agree with, nor penalty for saying unpopular things. Then, it's OK for downvotes to serve the role this "more flags" idea does. Downvotes then unambiguously mean: uncivil; frivolous; factually wrong; repetitive; unwanted. (And, moderators could focus on highly-downvoted comments as much as 'flags'.) (Previous comment, with more backlinks, on this idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721853 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721853 ) Another related idea: never show a comment at 'maximum negative' score to a person who hasn't yet voted. Show it as '-3' instead (no matter how many net downvotes it's received). Then, there's always a motivation for adding your own independent judgement. (Once they vote, the true-but-truncated-to-range score can be shown.) The poster could see the 'true' score, so they know if they've really touched a nerve.
  • Perceval 17y ago
    I dislike agree/disagree voting overall. We all dislike groupthink, and we all appreciate constructive informative posts, and we all like differing viewpoints. So why have a moderation system that records or values agreement/disagreement at all? I think gojomo is 100% right that people should be rewarded for constructive informative civil contributions, rather than because the moderator happens to agree with you. An agree/disagree arrow could be left simply as a honeypot, so that people don't use the other descriptive ratings as a substitute for agreement/disagreement.
    • noodle 17y ago
      as opposed to the groupthink that comes with the standard one dimensional moderation scheme?
    • qw 17y ago
      The problem is that not everyone thinks as you, and will vote based on agreement/disagreement. We need a clear separation of these types of votes.
• pavs 17y ago
  For the love of everything that is good, please either block techcrunch (very unlikely to happen) or put a hard cap on how many stories can be submitted within 24 hours from one domain (I suggest 2). Sometimes reading HN feels like reading TC rss feed. If I want to read every single story from TC I would have subscribed to their RSS feed.
  • swombat 17y ago
    TC is extremely relevant to start-ups. Blocking it would be pretty ... silly.
    • kogir 17y ago
      Sadly, while still relevant, Techcrunch is slowly becoming less intellectually satisfying. There's been more drama than needed as of late in my opinion.
    • pavs 17y ago
      I am not saying all of TC is irrelevant. We have our share of irrelevant stuff from other sites too. But on average we get 3-4 stories from TC posted here on HN, stuff like twitter going down (every freaking time, how often does it happen?), facebook going down for 5 minutes, rackspace going down (in itself is relevant news, but from TC the news is the internet went down because TC is hosted on rackspace). If this much crap was posted from any other website, they would have been blocked without any debate whatsoever. There is a reason people subscribe to rss feed, why would I come to HN to see one blog hogging the whole site? Which is why I suggest either a hard cap on number of subs per domain per day or give users the option to block out certain domain so that they don't see it in their HN. I don't think it is an unreasonable or very difficult request to implement.
• jmonegro 17y ago
  Replacing downvotes with a flagging system or similar might be a good idea: I've been noticing that people tend to downvote other users not because their comments are "uncivil" or "frivolous", but because they express an opinion different from theirs. I've seen many perfectly-civilized comments being downvoted, presumably, because they are controversial, though I have seen others that deserve downvotes because of their nature. The way I see it, replacing downvotes with a comment flagging system would probably reduce the amount rude comments because they'd probably be killed soon enough. However, it eliminates the penalty of being rude (a drop in karma), and some visible way of penalization must be put in place for it to be effective in deterring users from being rude. A work around might be that for every killed comment (due to numerous flags) a user gets -5 or -10 karma. Things would behave differently with posts, but these are just my first thoughts (when it comes to commenting).
  • tokenadult 17y ago
    I've been noticing that people tend to downvote other users not because their comments are "uncivil" or "frivolous", but because they express an opinion different from theirs. I bookmarked this HN comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 a while ago, because it expressed the view of pg in an earlier era of HN that "it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness." But it's interesting to see pg opening up today's discussion of new, more nuanced, flags, and that would change the core meaning of a downvote. I'm all for learning a new system of flagging and voting if that helps encourage a thoughtful community.
    • pg 17y ago
      I sometimes downvote things that seem mistaken. I think most users do. This didn't use to be a problem when there were only a couple thousand users who often knew one another personally. The problem is voting to agree/disagree combined with a larger and probably less thoughtful audience. That's when it starts to feel like a mob.
• maxklein 17y ago
  I think you should add this as an option, and only for the karmarific users. This way, less than 10% of the site would actually use this, and since these are likely to be the oldest and community invested users, the flagging would always lag behind the movement of the site userbase, leading to a stabilizing force in community feel.
  • TeHCrAzY 17y ago
    This concept needs more exploration. The delay/lag seems very promising on cursorary inspection.
• whyme 17y ago
  How about allowing the primary post to have extra settings that affects what can/can't happen: Example: Min karma to post: 1000, Min Civility to post: -100 points. This way if the community sees a mob problem, the community can tweak the settings accordingly. I'm sure you can come up a good algorithm to maintain a moving set of defaults. Also, maybe allow readers to filter posts based upon their threshold settings.
  • ScottWhigham 17y ago
    I'm downmodding now because I think this is a bad contribution but rather because, since this isn't a poll per se, I think that upmodding/downmodding is sort of how we are voting. So don't take it the wrong way :)
    • whyme 17y ago
      No worries. I'm partial on it myself. I don't like the idea of excluding people, however I was trying to think of a way to have people care about the quality of their contributions. ie. give the community incentive to be nice :) It's certainly not that easy.
• ScottWhigham 17y ago
  I'm likely to be of the lowest caste here but I think a single flag works for me. I tried to think of others and the only two logical ones I could think of were "Spam" and "Duplicate" for posts. I support you could flag comments but again I see two options: "Spam" or "Offensive". In any case - that is to say regardless of the reason it was flagged - I think it should be killed. Therefore one "flag" link and that's it.
• mrlebowski 17y ago
  Should down voting some one also negatively affect the down voter's karma? It will help restrict the number of down votes anyone will give..
  • tokenadult 17y ago
    Aren't many downvotes efforts to improve the community, and thus worthy of a karma INCREASE, if anything?
• mhb 17y ago
  Maybe this is the place to ask why, relatively frequently, there are comments which seem perfectly reasonable and inoffensive, that are dead.
  • allenbrunson 17y ago
    typically, most accounts get banned for one or two really unpleasant comments. once an account is dead, every comment that person makes in the future will also be insta-deaded, whether it is civil or not.
  • swolchok 17y ago
    If it looks like noise, it deserves to go. In other words, if, after reading a comment, I feel that my time was wasted, I should downvote the comment.
• wglb 17y ago
  I would favor the addition of a rude/inappropriate/trollish vote that would be anonymous in addition to the current upvote/downvote. Perhaps those are three buttons that are downvotes in that category. This would add a useful dimension to the feedback. I find myself using the up/down arrow largely for "contributes to the discussion". There is an element of "I agree", but I frequently click up on a comment that I disagree with because it is well-reasoned or brings up a thoughtful angle that is new. To avoid the mob clicking of these new buttons, they could be shown only to the author of the comment, or very high karma individuals.
• breck 17y ago
  > Yeah, I've noticed a decline in the tone of comments too. The site seems to be getting nastier. I occasionally find myself thinking lately that I just don't want to be here anymore. Could the community help monitor the general tone of the site? It seems like keeping things civil is a hard task for you and the top users. Could there be an automatic survey sent out each week or month to a random sample set of users to measure their overall satisfaction with the site and tone? It could even be just one question ("How would you rate the discourse on HN lately? Highly Civil, Civil, or Uncivil"). That way there would be a good objective gauge to see trends in tone and to monitor the impact of any changes like flags. As the site continues to grow it gets more challenging to preserve the level of discussion. Having some long term measure of that might be helpful and make it easier to know when a new feature needs to be implemented.
• gruseom 17y ago
  I hadn't noticed the site getting nastier (and since everyone seems to agree that it has, I'm now regretting a recent nasty comment!) Regarding flags on comments (not stories), I suspect it might have more of an impact to add just one new type rather than several at once. That would send a clear message about what we're all being asked to focus on. Along those lines, I'd say "uncivil" is more important than "frivolous". In my observation, over the last few months, HN users have gotten pretty good at using downvotes to regulate the merely frivolous. If someone's comment has been flagged as uncivil it might be helpful to inform them of this with a call to action such as "Please be more polite" and a link to a fuller explanation of what they are being asked to do. I'm quite sure that many (though not all) people just don't realize how their comment might come across. Perhaps comments flagged as uncivil could remain editable for a longer period. It's true that this would distort the history of conversations a bit, but maybe in a good way. If I find out that I made a comment that people found rude, I'd like the option (after my two editable hours have expired) of editing my comment for civility and having it marked as such. After all, if one is found "guilty" by a jury of one's peers, it's good to have a way to make amends in addition to the negative feedback. Besides, if people started noticing comments that had been "edited for civility", social proof might nudge their own behavior in that direction.
• prakash 17y ago
  How about giving more people moderation access for a short time period, and then aggressively flagging/deleting a whole bunch of articles/comments.
• coffeemug 17y ago
  Gamedev.net has one of the most civil and informative forums on the internet. At some point they had a pretty mean spirited community too, and the owners pulled the site into one of the best sites on the internet. I spent a lot of time on these forums, and I think there are three main things that contribute to very high quality. - Non-threaded comments. I know this has been discussed to death, but I think the downside of threaded comments (fragmentation of the discussion and incentive for witty one-liners) far outweighs the benefit (having separate unrelated conversations). A non-threaded approach gives huge incentive to bring the community together into a single coherent conversation, gives the reader a great sense of a timeline (which gives further incentive to maintain an intelligent discussion), and discourages fragmentation of the discussion to a point where it isn't interesting to anyone anymore. I know this is a big change, but I would strongly encourage at least giving it a serious consideration - it can make a huge difference if done right. - Active topics - on sites like Hacker News and Reddit it's very easy to lose track of interesting discussions that are going on because top threads are tightly coupled with the top articles. We can have interesting discussions long after the article has left the front page, and an active topics page would go far towards encouraging intelligent interaction. Basically, every time an article is commented on, this article goes to the top of the list. This way I can see all active discussions at glance (including the ones I participated in), and continue interesting discussions, even though they're not on the front page. - User rating system (not article/comment system) - in real life, if I am usually a very interesting, intelligent person, and one day I suddenly act as a jerk, it can very seriously ruin my reputation. On gamedev people rate users, not comments and articles. So, I can give a user a rating - extremely helpful, helpful, not helpful, jerk. The karma is a combination of ratings for a given user, and the strength of a user's vote is proportional to his karma. So, if someone is a jerk one day, it can affect his karma far more significantly than simply downvoting his comment. In addition, jerks have less affect on the system overall. Rating people's comments never made sense to me - it always ends up signaling agreement or disagreement vs. usefulness. If people rate users instead of comments, this problem goes away always entirely, plus very strongly discourages aggressive behavior. I think these three things would help immensely to scale the community. These are big changes, but I think they're worth seriously thinking about.
• richardw 17y ago
  How about letting those with big karma attach tags to their downvote? Others could agree by downvoting the tag. This allows a slightly more organic approach where the best tags emerge over time. Maybe anyone over (lower) karma can propose a tag but the tag only applies if a few agree on it.
• ErrantX 17y ago
  One bug I did notice (slightly off topic but this seems an appropriate place) is that people can work around the cool off delay for replying by clicking the "link" button on a comment. This has given me a textbox and let me reply to the comment way before the cool off.
• iamelgringo 17y ago
  I somehow get the sense that the quality of the discussion has correlates with how long an article lives on the front page. A year or two ago, articles could hang on the front page for a day or two. Now, the volume of new articles pushes interesting discussions like this one off the front page within hours. I pretty rarely visit page 2. I used to spend 30-35 minutes writing and editing a comment. It doesn't seem worth it any more when the article is going to drop off the front page in 8 - 12 hours. When I thought people might read it for a day or to, it felt like it was worth the investment. It seems like the current speed of article churn has increased the pace of HN, and has inadvertently encouraged shorter, shoot from the hip type comments rather than encourage slower more thoughtful discussion.