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Do we have any transparency (i.e. a single doc) about your site guidelines? Which ones are downgraded? What about flagging? When does a comment flagged by a us

Do we have any transparency (i.e. a single doc) about your site guidelines? Which ones are downgraded? What about flagging? When does a comment flagged by a user get unflagged, if that happens?

dang 4y ago
There's no single doc. We keep https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html at the level of principles, not practices, because trying to compile a complete doc would be nightmarishly long and then no one would read it (except maybe the litigious types looking for loopholes). It's for similar reasons that we don't publish a full moderation log. There is tons of information about basically everything we do embedded in my moderation comments but one has to use HN Search to find it (that's why I link to HN search so often). One of these years I might try to wrangle a bunch of those into a bunch of essay-style commentaries, if only because they would be easier to link to and would lighten the load of always having to explain the same things. We're transparent in the sense of always trying to answer questions, though. Comments by users can get manually unflagged by mods but I don't think there's a software way to do that. Flagkilled posts, though, can get unkilled by user vouches (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch).
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Thanks, dang. Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN. Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair. I don't know what HN's internal database is, but it seems like it could be a simple query or set of queries to determine if [flagged] is being used by a group of people as a way of censoring comments they don't agree with. After all, they're not required to justify their flag. Some simple statistics would answer this question. For instance, in "sometimes turn flags off" what percentage of the time does that happen?
  - dang 4y ago
    We do look at that sort of thing but I wouldn't say it's straightforward to determine because we don't have access to people's intent. We turn flags off a small percentage of the time. I don't know how small because although we log the flagging history, we don't keep it in a form that's easy to compute.

Do we have any transparency (i.e. a single doc) about your site guidelines? Which ones are downgraded? What about flagging? When does a comment flagged by a user get unflagged, if that happens?

dang 4y ago

There's no single doc. We keep https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html at the level of principles, not practices, because trying to compile a complete doc would be nightmarishly long and then no one would read it (except maybe the litigious types looking for loopholes). It's for similar reasons that we don't publish a full moderation log. There is tons of information about basically everything we do embedded in my moderation comments but one has to use HN Search to find it (that's why I link to HN search so often). One of these years I might try to wrangle a bunch of those into a bunch of essay-style commentaries, if only because they would be easier to link to and would lighten the load of always having to explain the same things. We're transparent in the sense of always trying to answer questions, though. Comments by users can get manually unflagged by mods but I don't think there's a software way to do that. Flagkilled posts, though, can get unkilled by user vouches (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch).

AlbertCory 4y ago
Thanks, dang. Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN. Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair. I don't know what HN's internal database is, but it seems like it could be a simple query or set of queries to determine if [flagged] is being used by a group of people as a way of censoring comments they don't agree with. After all, they're not required to justify their flag. Some simple statistics would answer this question. For instance, in "sometimes turn flags off" what percentage of the time does that happen?
- dang 4y ago
  We do look at that sort of thing but I wouldn't say it's straightforward to determine because we don't have access to people's intent. We turn flags off a small percentage of the time. I don't know how small because although we log the flagging history, we don't keep it in a form that's easy to compute.