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Why was this flagged? I don’t even necessarily agree with the author’s arguments and conclusion, and honestly I have no clue what to think with all the informa

by sethc2 6y ago

Why was this flagged? I don’t even necessarily agree with the author’s arguments and conclusion, and honestly I have no clue what to think with all the information I hear that is constantly changing from the various tribes. But when something gets flagged simply because he advocates for ending the lockdown, I go from thinking the lockdown is probably necessary and trust the decision is made for reasons I don’t understand, to thinking like the paranoid conspiracy theorist that this is just a totalitarian power grab, and figure the need to suppress dissent means that it is more likely his position is the right one. If the ideas he is presenting are so stupid then people can decide that for themselves and don’t need some moral busybody protecting us from thinking for ourselves by flagging anything that states the opposite of what their tribe thinks is true.

ryankemper 6y ago
Out of curiosity, do you know if it being flagged means it's now invisible to others? Or is "flagged" the intermediate state between a normal submission and a dead one?
- sethc2 6y ago
  Not sure. All I know is I saw the article on the main page, navigated away and when I came back it was gone. I searched for the title and then found it but it was flagged. I was thinking of sharing on Facebook but I'd probably get banned, even if i still feel we should probably keep the lockdown for a little bit longer, because apparently the moral authorities have decided it is off limits to suggest we should end the lockdown or even discuss whether we should.
- dang 6y ago
  It's the latter. It's possible for a submission to get so many flags that it also gets killed, but the software doesn't do that once there are lots of comments.
  - sethc2 6y ago
    That seems like a pretty good algorithm.
    - DanBC 6y ago
      Not if all the comments are versions of "this article is wrong".
uniqueid 6y ago
This is not a great place to start... > I’m a software / site reliability engineer > based out of Santa Barbara, California. Given the stakes, we should have a preference for Coronavirus articles written by experts. It's fine for authors to trash the WHO or to disagree with the government, but they should have the chops if the rest of us are going to upvote them. I'm disappointed with the HN community. The past few weeks, most of the medical articles to hit the front page have been written by dabblers.
- cjhopman 6y ago
  > I'm disappointed with the HN community. The past few weeks, most of the medical articles to hit the front page have been written by dabblers. Honestly, that shouldn't be surprising. AFAICT, the only way in which the HN community exceeds some random subreddit is in thinking highly of itself. HN itself combined with hckrnews.com provides an okay enough ui and mix of random interesting articles that makes it still beat out reddit for me.
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    I still trust HN content more than other sites. The average age here is probably a decade older than Reddit, and people here value rationality, even if we sometimes fail to exhibit it.
    - cjhopman 6y ago
      That's a good point. The stated goals or objectives or values of a community or collective actually do have significant impact on the behavior of that community. It's too bad that HN generally doesn't recognize that when looking at things like Google's "Don't be evil".
      - cjhopman 6y ago
        As an example, Amazon is fairly well-known in the industry as having a set of principles and with the fact that those are often described as having been weaponized to support people's positions. I actually think that weaponization of principles or slogans or mottos is not uncommon. Different principles, though, have different flexibility on how far they can be used to justify things (i.e "focus on the user" has different flexibility than "move fast and break things" or "don't be evil").
sethc2 6y ago
Glad to see this no longer appears to be flagged. I'm curious if anyone knows what HN's process is for unflagging an entry. How do they decide what remains flagged?
- ryankemper 6y ago
  In this case I e-mailed hn@ycombinator.com to inquire about why it was flagged, and Dang jumped in and lifted the flags after quickly scanning things over to check that it was legitimate. Basically, users flagged it. I think the explanation Dang gave me in his e-mail reply is almost certainly correct, and it doesn't contain anything sensitive so I'll just share it here: > All I can tell you, though, is that users flagged it. We don't know why they flag things, and can only guess. My guess in this case is that it's a combination of some users having covid-story-fatigue, and other users disagreeing with the view in the article. As you know, this question has become politicized and is getting more polarizing as we go forward.

by sethc2 6y ago

ryankemper 6y ago

Out of curiosity, do you know if it being flagged means it's now invisible to others? Or is "flagged" the intermediate state between a normal submission and a dead one?

sethc2 6y ago
Not sure. All I know is I saw the article on the main page, navigated away and when I came back it was gone. I searched for the title and then found it but it was flagged. I was thinking of sharing on Facebook but I'd probably get banned, even if i still feel we should probably keep the lockdown for a little bit longer, because apparently the moral authorities have decided it is off limits to suggest we should end the lockdown or even discuss whether we should.
dang 6y ago
It's the latter. It's possible for a submission to get so many flags that it also gets killed, but the software doesn't do that once there are lots of comments.
- sethc2 6y ago
  That seems like a pretty good algorithm.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    Not if all the comments are versions of "this article is wrong".

uniqueid 6y ago

This is not a great place to start... > I’m a software / site reliability engineer > based out of Santa Barbara, California. Given the stakes, we should have a preference for Coronavirus articles written by experts. It's fine for authors to trash the WHO or to disagree with the government, but they should have the chops if the rest of us are going to upvote them. I'm disappointed with the HN community. The past few weeks, most of the medical articles to hit the front page have been written by dabblers.

cjhopman 6y ago
> I'm disappointed with the HN community. The past few weeks, most of the medical articles to hit the front page have been written by dabblers. Honestly, that shouldn't be surprising. AFAICT, the only way in which the HN community exceeds some random subreddit is in thinking highly of itself. HN itself combined with hckrnews.com provides an okay enough ui and mix of random interesting articles that makes it still beat out reddit for me.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  I still trust HN content more than other sites. The average age here is probably a decade older than Reddit, and people here value rationality, even if we sometimes fail to exhibit it.
  - cjhopman 6y ago
    That's a good point. The stated goals or objectives or values of a community or collective actually do have significant impact on the behavior of that community. It's too bad that HN generally doesn't recognize that when looking at things like Google's "Don't be evil".
    - cjhopman 6y ago
      As an example, Amazon is fairly well-known in the industry as having a set of principles and with the fact that those are often described as having been weaponized to support people's positions. I actually think that weaponization of principles or slogans or mottos is not uncommon. Different principles, though, have different flexibility on how far they can be used to justify things (i.e "focus on the user" has different flexibility than "move fast and break things" or "don't be evil").

sethc2 6y ago

Glad to see this no longer appears to be flagged. I'm curious if anyone knows what HN's process is for unflagging an entry. How do they decide what remains flagged?

ryankemper 6y ago
In this case I e-mailed hn@ycombinator.com to inquire about why it was flagged, and Dang jumped in and lifted the flags after quickly scanning things over to check that it was legitimate. Basically, users flagged it. I think the explanation Dang gave me in his e-mail reply is almost certainly correct, and it doesn't contain anything sensitive so I'll just share it here: > All I can tell you, though, is that users flagged it. We don't know why they flag things, and can only guess. My guess in this case is that it's a combination of some users having covid-story-fatigue, and other users disagreeing with the view in the article. As you know, this question has become politicized and is getting more polarizing as we go forward.