4 ms·

Ask HN: What's up with all the unjustified flagging?

10 points by crehn 9y ago

jasonkostempski 9y ago
Even if it's not the intended purpose, it's the downvote button of HN.
gus_massa 9y ago
Do you have an example or two? It's more easy to understand your complain with an example. Perhaps they are off-topic. From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003501 > What to Submit > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Anyway, for an official answer or if you see another story wrongly flagged, you can write to the mods: hn@ycombinator.com >
- nicolashahn 9y ago
  Not the OP but I just happened to click on this (request for highly intelligent people to share experiences) in my RSS feed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007404 and couldn't really see a reason why it would be flagged, besides maybe being in slightly bad taste and attracting r/iamverysmart types. I also noticed something strange with a thread comment I made a few days ago. It had a link to a Youtube video that some might find politically incorrect (people talking about IQ being a predictor of success and homogenous societies being less violent). It was immediately downvoted several times but spawned a large discussion thread. All my replies within the thread seemed to be purely upvoted, but were in line with what I was saying in my original comment. After a while (several hours), the original comment made it to positive points as well. That made me think that there was some (possibly politically motivated) band of users that were scanning for certain things to downvote, and the video I linked or perhaps the other content of my comment met their qualifications. They immediately hit my parent comment (and overlooked my other replies), driving it to the bottom of the page, but it eventually managed to crawl back on its own merit. I'm probably just paranoid, though this thread increases my suspicions.

10 points by crehn 9y ago

Even if it's not the intended purpose, it's the downvote button of HN.

Do you have an example or two? It's more easy to understand your complain with an example. Perhaps they are off-topic. From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003501 > What to Submit > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Anyway, for an official answer or if you see another story wrongly flagged, you can write to the mods: hn@ycombinator.com >

nicolashahn 9y ago
Not the OP but I just happened to click on this (request for highly intelligent people to share experiences) in my RSS feed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007404 and couldn't really see a reason why it would be flagged, besides maybe being in slightly bad taste and attracting r/iamverysmart types. I also noticed something strange with a thread comment I made a few days ago. It had a link to a Youtube video that some might find politically incorrect (people talking about IQ being a predictor of success and homogenous societies being less violent). It was immediately downvoted several times but spawned a large discussion thread. All my replies within the thread seemed to be purely upvoted, but were in line with what I was saying in my original comment. After a while (several hours), the original comment made it to positive points as well. That made me think that there was some (possibly politically motivated) band of users that were scanning for certain things to downvote, and the video I linked or perhaps the other content of my comment met their qualifications. They immediately hit my parent comment (and overlooked my other replies), driving it to the bottom of the page, but it eventually managed to crawl back on its own merit. I'm probably just paranoid, though this thread increases my suspicions.