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Agreed! I think part of the problem could be that the first, say 10-20, comments on a controversial story won't be very good. This makes people flag it before (
by bbradley406 11y ago
Agreed! I think part of the problem could be that the first, say 10-20, comments on a controversial story won't be very good. This makes people flag it before (hopefully) a lot of genuine thought and effort goes into the comments. I'm not familiar with how flags affect a post's rank on the front page. Thinking out loud, a system where the first user flag has minimal impact and the impact grows very slowly with each additional flag could work.
Even though I find it uninteresting, it's arguably necessary in the same way people post here when they can't reach someone at a large company they're having issues with in the hopes that an employee will come to their aid.
- geofft 11y agoHm, there's a meta-question of whether the purpose of HN is stories or comments. I think the story itself is worth the hacker community reading, regardless of the quality of the comments. A specific flag for "the comments will turn into a flamewar, but we shouldn't let the threat of a flamewar silence the story itself" might be useful. And in this case, 'dang manually did take action to curb low-quality comments. Having a user-initiated flag that restricts posting by users postdating the story, increases the waiting period on replies, etc. (and alerts moderators) might be more useful than simply removing the story from the front page (but allowing people to come in via external links).