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What's the difference? Anything controversial seems to get flagged and die off quickly, whether mods or the hive execute it doesn't make a net difference. The
by metadat 4y ago
What's the difference? Anything controversial seems to get flagged and die off quickly, whether mods or the hive execute it doesn't make a net difference.
The heated discussions are often of dubious quality. But it also sucks some of the fun out of HN when the pile-ons die so quickly. Sometimes companies deserve to fry and HN is probably a healthy outlet. In this case Canonical has earned it by not putting users first.
Curiosity killed the cat.
- josephcsible 4y agoAuthor of said flagged post here. I agree with you. I wish HN worked such that if a post has more upvotes from high-rep users than flags, that the flags would have no effect whatsoever.
- metadat 4y agoI would personally like that, too. But Dang's bonzai tree that is HN is curated a very particular way which increasingly mostly murders any dramatic posts. I blame Elon, because the Twitter shit really fucked with this site in a way I'd not previously observed. Just another (probably incorrect) theory. I'm sympathetic in that poor Dang is already grinding it day in and out to keep things afloat, the dumpster fire threads can get out of control pretty quickly and can get ugly and abusive. It's a fine a line.
- dang 4y agoI wish we could get away with that but one of the dismayingly consistent findings of running an internet forum (or this one, anyhow) is that you can't rely on high rep for almost anything.
- josephcsible 4y agoI wonder if there's any good way to avoid the vetocracy-like effect then, where a small number of users who don't like a post can effectively bury it even if a much larger number of users do like it.
- dang 4y agoAppeal to the mods to overturn the flags on constitutional grounds. We do do that, perhaps a quarter of the time. This is maybe not quite accurate though: > a small number of users who don't like a post can effectively bury it even if a much larger number of users do like it The tug of war between flags and upvotes isn't hopelessly biased against upvoters.
- dang 4y agoThere isn't much difference along some axes (e.g. downranking is downranking) but there's a huge difference along other axes (e.g. organic community response is very different from authority intervention).