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Ask HN: Can we talk about the role of flagging on the front page?
I'm often surprised by how large a role flagging plays for how long stories live on the front page. For example, I presume most (all?) of the precipitous drops in this chart are due to user flags:
http://hnrankings.info/6/1-10/
That's a lot of discussions that are prevented from happening because a small minority thinks they are inappropriate for the site. Is this a good thing (because it preserves harmony) or a bad thing (because it shuts down productive discussion)?
- imarg 11y agoIsn't there a way to see if an article was flagged? (I suppose that if you have to deduct flagging from changes in ranking that there indeed isn't a way)
- imarg 11y agoWell it seems I was wrong, I just saw an article with a [flagged] indication. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11076832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11076832
- SamReidHughes 11y agoThat means the submission is [dead], killed by user flags. Other submissions might have had users click "flag" but not enough to become [dead].
- dang 11y agoYou're right, but it's on our list to start displaying [flagged] whether the post is dead or not, once the flags go beyond a certain threshold. Otherwise things seem inconsistent, because e.g. we don't kill flagged stories if they have a bunch of comments.
- imarg 11y agoOk, but there is also a [dead] indication. What is the difference?
- SamReidHughes 11y agoMy understanding is that since [flagged] is for stuff that was killed by user flags, other dead stuff is dead for some other reason. Like automatic spam detection, [dupe], moderator actions.
- Mz 11y agoMy vague hand-wavy understanding is that there is a team of unnamed mods beyond the one we know the name of and they are capable of adding tags that can get it dropped substantially. This apparently happened to one of my posts. I have no idea what is good or bad at this point. But I can tell you that I think what goes on here is probably a lot more complicated than you think it is.
- jimrandomh 11y agoI'd worry that if flags were weakened too much, then the front page would start having false stories on it. The ratio of flags to views is likely to be much more informative than the ratio of upvotes to views, especially if weighted by some metric of account trust.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Tomte 11y agoIt is a good thing not because it "preserves harmony", but because low-value submissions (in your case: trying to stir up controversy with harsh words where no "banning" exists) can be deemphasized and open up space for regular submissions.
- dang 11y agoThat's a fine general comment but I need to pipe up for nkurz. I don't think he's ever tried to stir up controversy with harsh words. He's mostly concerned with letting people have their say as a matter of openness. You've probably noticed how often people insist that's what they care about while their behavior suggests lower motives, but from everything I've seen, nkurz really does.
- panic 11y agoFlagging hits more than just low-value submissions. People also flag totally valid submissions that they just disagree with (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819778 is a submission I distinctly remember this happening to).
- thenomad 11y agoHarsh words? Where? The most harsh phrase I can see in OP's post is "small minority", and that's not exactly South Park material.
- thenomad 11y agoCould you point out some examples of specific stories that you think dropped due to flagging? It's an interesting point but looking at that graph I see only one story that looks like it was probably flagged ("rent a minority"). There's a precipitous drop for both "Deco software: React native IDE" and "convert CURL commands to GO", but both are after hours and hours on the front page, and neither look like obvious flagging material :)
- dang 11y ago> after hours and hours on the front page The software downweights stories after they've been on the front page a long time (currently 15 hours).
- thenomad 11y agoThanks for confirming - that was what I assumed. I really couldn't see the HN community suddenly getting their hate on for an article on converting CURL commands to Go! :)