Having tracked the position of stories on the first 10 pages for a few weeks last December, I saw a lot of things flagged off the front page before they even ha

Having tracked the position of stories on the first 10 pages for a few weeks last December, I saw a lot of things flagged off the front page before they even had a chance to get comments. While I can't and don't blame HN for the flagging activity for users, I can and do blame it for not making flags public. Votes are one thing, but flagging articles isn't an expression of anything private, or at least it shouldn't be. If flags were public and came with a bunch of radio buttons and a text field for a reason for the flag, that'd be at least a start. "Send us an email when you see a pattern in the data we don't provide" doesn't really cut it.