3 ms·

Thanks, dang. Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN. Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually

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.