3 ms·

At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? Maybe this post isn't the one to do it, but there has been an onslaught of stori

by slg 2y ago

At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? Maybe this post isn't the one to do it, but there has been an onslaught of stories about the damage Musk and DOGE is doing to the US government including lots of tech specific stories. This is an important ongoing story that is relevant to the community here and every post about it shoots up the front page of HN only to disappear minutes later because of mass flagging.

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
One solution might be to limit how many new discussions a user can flag within a certain period.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  I suspect the curation mentioned above[0] is crowd-sourced to a relatively small handful of “power” users with an outsized amount of flags in general. Probably not much of a solution to limit that. 0: Slightly confused; I’m referring to dang’s comment, which I thought was the GP comment.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
    I don't think it's very high, like 1500 upvotes or something, there is a large population of people who can flag. Another idea is to make flags fractional, so the more upvotes you have the more weight your flags have. So those newly empowered get say 0.1 of a flag while more highly rated users get progressively closer to 1 flag.
dang 2y ago
> At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? I'm not sure "big" is the right word because we're not optimizing HN for topic importance - that would make for a current affairs site, which HN is not [1, 2]. But maybe that's hair-splitting in this case. The short answer to your question is that when there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT), moderators turn off flags on stories that contain Significant New Information (SNI) that is interesting in HN's sense of the word (i.e. gratifying intellectual curiosity) and there is a fair chance of the article supporting a substantively different discussion than the ones which have already recently appeared on the same topic. If you want more information, I'd start with my other post in this subthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092) and go on to the other links there. That should give a pretty complete explanation. If, after that, there's still a question I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20current%20affairs%20site&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- slg 2y ago
  >moderators turn off flags on stories I replied to your comment in that other chain, but just want to point something else out here specifically. There seems to be more than just flags that are dragging down this story. The top post on HN at the moment has 117 points and is 3 hours old. This post has 238 points and is 1 hour old and is currently number 8 on the front page. Number 7 is currently a post with 28 points posted 2 hours ago. There is clearly something else at work here besides flags and maybe disabling flags isn't enough to give these type of posts staying power on the front page of HN.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Dang should have manually downranked it because anti-Musk politics are off-topic on HN.
    - dang 2y ago
      There's room for an interesting discussion here, as I tried to argue at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992992.
    - erikerikson 2y ago
      It is a technology related article that is detailed and specific about things which appear to violate practices that have been part of the social contact for some time. Relevant regardless of optics.
  - dang 2y ago
    This is in the FAQ: "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). I turned off the flags and rolled back the clock on this submission so that it would be on the front page and have a chance at a thorough discussion. I didn't do that so much that it would go straight to #1, though, because that would not be in the interests of the site. These things need to be controlled burns.

by slg 2y ago

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago

One solution might be to limit how many new discussions a user can flag within a certain period.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
I suspect the curation mentioned above[0] is crowd-sourced to a relatively small handful of “power” users with an outsized amount of flags in general. Probably not much of a solution to limit that. 0: Slightly confused; I’m referring to dang’s comment, which I thought was the GP comment.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
  I don't think it's very high, like 1500 upvotes or something, there is a large population of people who can flag. Another idea is to make flags fractional, so the more upvotes you have the more weight your flags have. So those newly empowered get say 0.1 of a flag while more highly rated users get progressively closer to 1 flag.

dang 2y ago

> At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? I'm not sure "big" is the right word because we're not optimizing HN for topic importance - that would make for a current affairs site, which HN is not [1, 2]. But maybe that's hair-splitting in this case. The short answer to your question is that when there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT), moderators turn off flags on stories that contain Significant New Information (SNI) that is interesting in HN's sense of the word (i.e. gratifying intellectual curiosity) and there is a fair chance of the article supporting a substantively different discussion than the ones which have already recently appeared on the same topic. If you want more information, I'd start with my other post in this subthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092) and go on to the other links there. That should give a pretty complete explanation. If, after that, there's still a question I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20current%20affairs%20site&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

slg 2y ago
>moderators turn off flags on stories I replied to your comment in that other chain, but just want to point something else out here specifically. There seems to be more than just flags that are dragging down this story. The top post on HN at the moment has 117 points and is 3 hours old. This post has 238 points and is 1 hour old and is currently number 8 on the front page. Number 7 is currently a post with 28 points posted 2 hours ago. There is clearly something else at work here besides flags and maybe disabling flags isn't enough to give these type of posts staying power on the front page of HN.
- immibis 2y ago
  Dang should have manually downranked it because anti-Musk politics are off-topic on HN.
  - dang 2y ago
    There's room for an interesting discussion here, as I tried to argue at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992992.
  - erikerikson 2y ago
    It is a technology related article that is detailed and specific about things which appear to violate practices that have been part of the social contact for some time. Relevant regardless of optics.
- dang 2y ago
  This is in the FAQ: "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). I turned off the flags and rolled back the clock on this submission so that it would be on the front page and have a chance at a thorough discussion. I didn't do that so much that it would go straight to #1, though, because that would not be in the interests of the site. These things need to be controlled burns.