3 ms·
It's not clear what the difference between mod and user flagging is. It's not clear that it matters. If the users are flagging it, then they are taking sides.
by andrewprock 11y ago
It's not clear what the difference between mod and user flagging is. It's not clear that it matters. If the users are flagging it, then they are taking sides.
- DanBC 11y ago> It's not clear what the difference between mod and user flagging is. I don't know how many mods there are, but it's a tiny number. There are very many users who can flag. I think user flagging needs a karma level of 30. It's a bit rude to say the mods are taking sides if those mods haven't done anything.
- andrewprock 11y agoNot being particularly interested in the moderation processes at hacker news, all I can say is that this flagging and it's effects does not reflect well on hacker news or it's users. In fact, this sort of feature looks like it's used for supression. Edited to add, since reply now seems to be broken for me: There is no "enable showdead" in my user profile settings, despite having registered more than a year ago. I presume one must gather sufficient "community support" before such features are enabled. What's most here dramatic is the enormous number of downvotes I've gotten for rather mundane and straightforward remarks.
- detaro 11y agoIf you enable showdead: in your user profile settings, you can see everything that was [flagged]-killed by users, marked as [dupe]licate (which can be done by users or mods) or marked [dead] (which is the automated spam filter). You can't see if something was flagged but not often enough to be killed by it. The number of flags necessary depends on activity on the submission (upvotes, comments) and possibly it's age. Have a look at the new queue with that on every now and then and you'll see that tools like this are needed. HN choose to put them mostly in the hands of the users instead of only a small number of mods (probably to get by with fewer mods). But of course giving everybody these tools means they are misused in drama-laden cases. HN is changing these things (e.g. relatively recently introducing the ability for users to "revive" killed posts by "vouching" for them. But that only works when something is really killed, so it doesn't remove the down-ranking from flags that haven't succeded in removing something).
- detaro 11y agoThat doesn't show up? https://imgur.com/MPZP7H5 https://imgur.com/MPZP7H5 I'm sure that has been there from the first day on HN for me, so it would be odd if it didn't for you. EDIT: and you can always reply from an individual comments page, I think the reply-link shows only up after a while for nested links (I guess the theory is to avoid getting to deeply nested comment trees to quickly?)