7 ms·

Here's another suggestion: flag sparingly. A lot of long-time HN'ers are frustrated at the "flag patrols" -- people of one group who don't like such-and-such a

Here's another suggestion: flag sparingly. A lot of long-time HN'ers are frustrated at the "flag patrols" -- people of one group who don't like such-and-such author and flag them and their submissions. I've heard several people complain to me about having normal articles flagged and I've done my share of complaining. Don't be the guy who takes out your personal grudges in the form of flagging. Let the votes work. The system will not work with punitive flagging. My policy is that I flag only when I'm convinced an article is going to take the board off the rails. That's a tough call anymore. With a large enough audience, people get emotional just about anything. But remember that HackerNews is defined the most by what the people don't do. They don't comment if they don't have something interesting to say, they don't flag unless absolutely necessary, they don't criticize unless it's in the spirit of discovery, they don't vote down unless it's really a trivial comment. Do less and you'll enjoy it more. With the crowd as large as it is, I'm starting to see good comment X which has ten sub-comments, nine of which either didn't understand the main comment or don't understand the issue yet want to score karma points by making somewhat snarky remarks. We all need to fight that tendency. We do that by doing less.

r00fus 15y ago
Moderation should be approached like web security - any feature has potential exploits. Expect the flag patrols and bury brigades because if you allow folks to downrate or flag, someone will abuse it. You know, the only site that had moderation pretty much figured out (meaning: signal to noise ratio is much better than rest of internet) for over a decade was Slashdot. Making the system both resilient to attack as well as usable for it's intended function is not straightforward or easy. Hey, I hear that Malda is looking for work... I'd hire someone like him or a Wikipedia veteran.
- irunbackwards 15y ago
  Haha, "Bury Brigade" ... cute.
blantonl 15y ago
I've been on HackerNews for a little over 2 years, and in that time I don't believe I've ever flagged any submission. I guess I've always thought that the voting process would always take it's course. Curious, if pg is reading this, how often does the flag link generate real actions on submissions?
- icebraining 15y ago
  I believe the flags are acted upon automatically if enough people flag the same item.
  - Confusion 15y ago
    Definitely: I've seen an article turn 'dead' the instant I flagged it. This was on the 'new' page, mind you.
- evilduck 15y ago
  Go through the new submissions instead of the front page. It gets a lot of spam.
duck 15y ago
Another thing that goes hand in hand with that is not to worry/complain about n many stories on the front page that suck or seem reddit like. The other 30 - n stories are probably pretty good... and in all reality we probably don't need to be reading that many in the first place. Flagging isn't going to solve anything with regards to this and you have to realize this is a community made up with people with many backgrounds, we all are going to have our own favorites.
dminor 15y ago
On the contrary, I think people should flag away -- but go to the new stories page first. There's plenty of spam and politics and duplicate content and other off-topic humdrum. And if you happen to come across an interesting article about hacking or startups, vote it up -- it might even make it to the front page.
- DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  Not sure if you know this or not, but flagging an article as it first appears prevents all other HNers from seeing it. Flagging it later on causes it to sink rapidly off the top page. This means that a very few people could prevent huge chunks of legitimate stories from being seen by fellow HNers by flagging. Flagging, for whatever reason, is much more powerful than voting. If you flag, you not only note that the article is bad, you prevent others from having a choice. That's why it should be used sparingly. If everybody flagged 10 articles a day, it's not that lots of bad articles would get sorted out, it's that nothing new would appear on the front page at all. Voting means "I don't like it" Flagging means "I decide nobody else should look at it" It's a completely different thing. Also appropriate material for HN is material of interest to hackers, not just hacking or startups. If you're flagging it because it's not hacking or startups, you're actively preventing the rest of us from seeing material that might be considered pretty good if we had a chance to rate it. You probably already know all of that. Just wanted to point it out for those who didn't.
  - dminor 15y ago
    > Not sure if you know this or not, but flagging an article as it first appears prevents all other HNers from seeing it. As I understand it, this is not the case. If enough people flag a story before it gets some upvotes, then it gets auto-killed, but one flag won't kill a story. It does make it harder to get to the front page though. > Flagging it later on causes it to sink rapidly off the top page. This is exactly how I'd expect a downvote to function, so I'd say flagging is serving a sort of dual purpose. If you look at the front page, there's no lack of quality stories. It's harder these days for any individual story to make it to the front page, but that's a function of greater submission volume. Quality discussions on the other hand have become more sparse as HN has grown. Perhaps it's a function of community size and there's no real fix for it.
Sukotto 15y ago
I've heard several people complain to me about having normal articles flagged How do you know an article is flagged (aside from someone posting a snark about how they flagged)? Does the OP of an article get notified?
- swombat 15y ago
  It goes from #4 on the front page to #243 or something equally ridiculous. Depending on how old the article is, the flag can either drop it by hundreds of places, or at least 10 places for a couple of flags. I have done some testing (a while ago), and found that having 2 people flag one of my articles when it had 40/50 points dropped it by 10 places in the next 5 minutes. Unflagging it restored the original position. Newer articles with fewer points get a much more dramatic effect, however, as far as I can tell.
jcr 15y ago
Daniel, I know you mean well, but your suggestion of "flag sparingly" is only useful some of the time, and there is code in place to handle those who flag excessively. As always, there's more to it than meets the eye. There is a great deal of "secret sauce" running on HN, and to prevent adversaries from abusing HN for their own gain, PG deliberately does not publicly divulge how a lot of things work. [1] You would need to have either a deep fascination with discussion forums, or far too much free time (probably both) to figure out some of the non-public details of how HN really works. If one really does their homework well and figures out some of the details, hopefully they have enough respect for PG, YC and all of the folks using HN to not abuse or divulge what they learn. Though the precise details are not public information, pg has publicly stated that he does have some form of (vote/flag) "ring detection" running here on HN to thwart group and/or multi-account manipulation. [2] Since the details are not public, there is really no way to know how effective the ring detection is, but suffice to say, if it wasn't an improvement, it wouldn't exist. When it comes to flagging and up-voting of submissions, the publicly described logic is both clever and fascinating. If you flag heavily up-voted submissions, your flags count less. Similarly, if you flag too many things (and most likely, too quickly), your flags count less. In other words, there are thresholds employed. [3,4] When it comes to flagging comments, I can't recall seeing any mention of how the comment flags are handled, and worse, there's nothing in my notes about it. Considering the potential for abuse, I doubt PG will ever give vague details about it. Spam comments are an interesting problem, and it's very difficult to solve. Allowing users to flag comments is one way to handle it, but divulging the details would most likely reduce the effectiveness of the counter-measures. There is still one place on HN where doing a lot of flagging and up-voting of submissions is both useful and beneficial to HN as a whole, namely, on the "new" page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest I'm sure many people appreciate the high signal to noise ratio here on HN, and would rather avoid the more noisy /newest page. None the less, people putting in some time to both flag spam and give up-votes to new submissions is what keeps the high signal to noise on the front page. Yes, even if you're just flagging spam on the /newest page, you can still trigger the "excessive flagger" threshold, and the result is (was?) the "flag" links disappear. I had it happen to me once a long time ago, but since then, I believe the system was changed to simply not count the flags once a user has passed the threshold value. I would bet a human being (pg or a moderator) looks at any account that flags too much to determine if the account should be banned, hell banned, deleted, or whatever. If they see that you're really just trying to flag the endless spam submissions, they probably just quietly appreciate your efforts. I've never received a gilded thank you note for flagging spam submissions, and I don't expect to get one, but I'm sure everyone who likes the high signal to noise ratio around here appreciates it. NOTE: Though the references below are from PG himself, it's entirely possible that he's changed his mind, and his code, since they were originally posted. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830838 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354900 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830485 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830531
ap22213 15y ago
One thing I never understood was whether a flag was the same as a downvote. In my interface, I don't have a down arrow next to the article or comment. But, there is a flag option. When people talk about downvoting, are they referring to flag? Or, something else that I don't have in my interface?
- JacobAldridge 15y ago
  As your karma score builds, you will gain access to some other features (the exact number has changed a few times, so I'm not sure what it is these days - I think 200 was a level for a while, and I note you're just below that). You won't ever get a downvote option for the article. You will eventually be able to downvote other people's comments - unless they are replying directly to you like I am now (this stops pointless bickering via votes). Flags are designed to note off-topic / incindiery submissions - saying 'this shouldn't be here' rather than 'I don't like this', and should be used sparingly given the extra power they represent.

r00fus 15y ago

Moderation should be approached like web security - any feature has potential exploits. Expect the flag patrols and bury brigades because if you allow folks to downrate or flag, someone will abuse it. You know, the only site that had moderation pretty much figured out (meaning: signal to noise ratio is much better than rest of internet) for over a decade was Slashdot. Making the system both resilient to attack as well as usable for it's intended function is not straightforward or easy. Hey, I hear that Malda is looking for work... I'd hire someone like him or a Wikipedia veteran.

irunbackwards 15y ago
Haha, "Bury Brigade" ... cute.

blantonl 15y ago

I've been on HackerNews for a little over 2 years, and in that time I don't believe I've ever flagged any submission. I guess I've always thought that the voting process would always take it's course. Curious, if pg is reading this, how often does the flag link generate real actions on submissions?

icebraining 15y ago
I believe the flags are acted upon automatically if enough people flag the same item.
- Confusion 15y ago
  Definitely: I've seen an article turn 'dead' the instant I flagged it. This was on the 'new' page, mind you.
evilduck 15y ago
Go through the new submissions instead of the front page. It gets a lot of spam.

duck 15y ago

Another thing that goes hand in hand with that is not to worry/complain about n many stories on the front page that suck or seem reddit like. The other 30 - n stories are probably pretty good... and in all reality we probably don't need to be reading that many in the first place. Flagging isn't going to solve anything with regards to this and you have to realize this is a community made up with people with many backgrounds, we all are going to have our own favorites.

dminor 15y ago

On the contrary, I think people should flag away -- but go to the new stories page first. There's plenty of spam and politics and duplicate content and other off-topic humdrum. And if you happen to come across an interesting article about hacking or startups, vote it up -- it might even make it to the front page.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago
Not sure if you know this or not, but flagging an article as it first appears prevents all other HNers from seeing it. Flagging it later on causes it to sink rapidly off the top page. This means that a very few people could prevent huge chunks of legitimate stories from being seen by fellow HNers by flagging. Flagging, for whatever reason, is much more powerful than voting. If you flag, you not only note that the article is bad, you prevent others from having a choice. That's why it should be used sparingly. If everybody flagged 10 articles a day, it's not that lots of bad articles would get sorted out, it's that nothing new would appear on the front page at all. Voting means "I don't like it" Flagging means "I decide nobody else should look at it" It's a completely different thing. Also appropriate material for HN is material of interest to hackers, not just hacking or startups. If you're flagging it because it's not hacking or startups, you're actively preventing the rest of us from seeing material that might be considered pretty good if we had a chance to rate it. You probably already know all of that. Just wanted to point it out for those who didn't.
- dminor 15y ago
  > Not sure if you know this or not, but flagging an article as it first appears prevents all other HNers from seeing it. As I understand it, this is not the case. If enough people flag a story before it gets some upvotes, then it gets auto-killed, but one flag won't kill a story. It does make it harder to get to the front page though. > Flagging it later on causes it to sink rapidly off the top page. This is exactly how I'd expect a downvote to function, so I'd say flagging is serving a sort of dual purpose. If you look at the front page, there's no lack of quality stories. It's harder these days for any individual story to make it to the front page, but that's a function of greater submission volume. Quality discussions on the other hand have become more sparse as HN has grown. Perhaps it's a function of community size and there's no real fix for it.

Sukotto 15y ago

I've heard several people complain to me about having normal articles flagged How do you know an article is flagged (aside from someone posting a snark about how they flagged)? Does the OP of an article get notified?

swombat 15y ago
It goes from #4 on the front page to #243 or something equally ridiculous. Depending on how old the article is, the flag can either drop it by hundreds of places, or at least 10 places for a couple of flags. I have done some testing (a while ago), and found that having 2 people flag one of my articles when it had 40/50 points dropped it by 10 places in the next 5 minutes. Unflagging it restored the original position. Newer articles with fewer points get a much more dramatic effect, however, as far as I can tell.

jcr 15y ago

Daniel, I know you mean well, but your suggestion of "flag sparingly" is only useful some of the time, and there is code in place to handle those who flag excessively. As always, there's more to it than meets the eye. There is a great deal of "secret sauce" running on HN, and to prevent adversaries from abusing HN for their own gain, PG deliberately does not publicly divulge how a lot of things work. [1] You would need to have either a deep fascination with discussion forums, or far too much free time (probably both) to figure out some of the non-public details of how HN really works. If one really does their homework well and figures out some of the details, hopefully they have enough respect for PG, YC and all of the folks using HN to not abuse or divulge what they learn. Though the precise details are not public information, pg has publicly stated that he does have some form of (vote/flag) "ring detection" running here on HN to thwart group and/or multi-account manipulation. [2] Since the details are not public, there is really no way to know how effective the ring detection is, but suffice to say, if it wasn't an improvement, it wouldn't exist. When it comes to flagging and up-voting of submissions, the publicly described logic is both clever and fascinating. If you flag heavily up-voted submissions, your flags count less. Similarly, if you flag too many things (and most likely, too quickly), your flags count less. In other words, there are thresholds employed. [3,4] When it comes to flagging comments, I can't recall seeing any mention of how the comment flags are handled, and worse, there's nothing in my notes about it. Considering the potential for abuse, I doubt PG will ever give vague details about it. Spam comments are an interesting problem, and it's very difficult to solve. Allowing users to flag comments is one way to handle it, but divulging the details would most likely reduce the effectiveness of the counter-measures. There is still one place on HN where doing a lot of flagging and up-voting of submissions is both useful and beneficial to HN as a whole, namely, on the "new" page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest I'm sure many people appreciate the high signal to noise ratio here on HN, and would rather avoid the more noisy /newest page. None the less, people putting in some time to both flag spam and give up-votes to new submissions is what keeps the high signal to noise on the front page. Yes, even if you're just flagging spam on the /newest page, you can still trigger the "excessive flagger" threshold, and the result is (was?) the "flag" links disappear. I had it happen to me once a long time ago, but since then, I believe the system was changed to simply not count the flags once a user has passed the threshold value. I would bet a human being (pg or a moderator) looks at any account that flags too much to determine if the account should be banned, hell banned, deleted, or whatever. If they see that you're really just trying to flag the endless spam submissions, they probably just quietly appreciate your efforts. I've never received a gilded thank you note for flagging spam submissions, and I don't expect to get one, but I'm sure everyone who likes the high signal to noise ratio around here appreciates it. NOTE: Though the references below are from PG himself, it's entirely possible that he's changed his mind, and his code, since they were originally posted. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830838 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354900 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830485 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830531

ap22213 15y ago

One thing I never understood was whether a flag was the same as a downvote. In my interface, I don't have a down arrow next to the article or comment. But, there is a flag option. When people talk about downvoting, are they referring to flag? Or, something else that I don't have in my interface?

JacobAldridge 15y ago
As your karma score builds, you will gain access to some other features (the exact number has changed a few times, so I'm not sure what it is these days - I think 200 was a level for a while, and I note you're just below that). You won't ever get a downvote option for the article. You will eventually be able to downvote other people's comments - unless they are replying directly to you like I am now (this stops pointless bickering via votes). Flags are designed to note off-topic / incindiery submissions - saying 'this shouldn't be here' rather than 'I don't like this', and should be used sparingly given the extra power they represent.