4 ms·
Ask HN: Who is flagging legitimate stories?
I don't know if this is a trend necessarily, but in the last 2 days I've seen 2 stories that I found interest in being flagged.
Does anyone monitor this sort of thing? And if so does HN take away "flagging" privileges from those who abuse it?
- Tomte 7y agoYes, they take flagging privileges away. Happened to me (shadow-flagging, my flags made no difference anymore – but my flagging privileges seem to have been restored in the meantime), of course without merit. ;-) I'm also flummoxed by some flags. Like my election results submissions just a few minutes ago. Yes, it's not final, but projections are very accurate, and every major news outlet is reporting those. Also a really bizarre medical story, which should fit HN's mission very well. People flagged it without comment. I thought, okay, it sounds outlandish, maybe people thought it was fake. So I submitted a bit later the peer-reviewed article in a reputable medical journal. Flagged without comments again.
- greenyoda 7y ago> Like my election results submissions just a few minutes ago. Yes, it's not final, but projections are very accurate, and every major news outlet is reporting those. The HN Guidelines say: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." Election results are (1) politics and (2) covered on TV news. But I'm puzzled about why your medical story got flagged. Could you post the link in a comment so we can see what it was?
- gus_massa 7y agoI guess one of the articles is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014408 I think that articles for and against homeopathy are autokilled. Perhaps the OP can write to the mods. The other article is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20016826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20016826 I'd blame also USA-centrism. A similar article about an election in USA would probably survive, and next year we will have an invasion of political articles. Probably it is a good idea to avoid posting all the election in all countries, but perhaps we can use a rule that says that we care about the countries that have nukes. (If it works in the UN, it can work in HN :).) (Hi from Argentina!)
- greenyoda 7y ago> I guess one of the articles is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014408 I think that articles for and against homeopathy are autokilled. Perhaps the OP can write to the mods. This article is marked "[dead]", not "[flagged][dead]", so it wasn't killed by user flags. Either the domain is banned, or the article was killed by a moderator. Since that article looks OK (it's a summary of scientific research), I've "vouched" it, and it's now alive again.