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A word of warning to others: if you visit that page and actively flag, you may lose your flagging privileges. It happened to lots of us here when the Snowden st

A word of warning to others: if you visit that page and actively flag, you may lose your flagging privileges. It happened to lots of us here when the Snowden story first broke - a lot of folks who regularly visited /newest to upvote/flag incoming stories lost their flagging privileges due to legitimately flagging the duplicates/blog spam/crap about the Snowden leaks. I can remember going to page 2 and 3 on /newest and 25 of the 30 stories shown would be dupes or crap about Snowden that was unworthy of HN. We got "punished" for doing what we thought was the right thing. And FYI - there is no timeout for lost flagging privileges that I know of. I suspect that > 50% of the stories on /noobstories are flag-worthy but do yourself a favor and just flag 1/10th of the stories you think are bad/unworthy. It's an unfortunate side effect of the flagging/downvoting policy here at HN.

ewoodrich 13y ago
For what it's worth, I lost flagging privileges around that time, and appear to have got them back. There may be a timeout based on magnitude of "illegitimate" flagging or something like that.
- ScottWhigham 13y ago
  Yes, I've since had mine restored. However, for mine at least, it happened the day after I posted a comment much like the one above. I suspect it was manual in my case. It could be that they reviewed/changed a whole bunch of people who lost the flagging privilege around that time as well, or it could be a timeout - I don't really know. I just know that, given how quickly my flagging privileges were restored after I made a similar comment in a popular thread, it appeared to be related to my comment.
- sitkack 13y ago
  I actually upvoted the Snowden Ted talk story from a couple days ago to have it deleted and my karma dropped by .7 overnight. Thought that was weird. If they are going to hellban stories why not just do it with code?

ewoodrich 13y ago

For what it's worth, I lost flagging privileges around that time, and appear to have got them back. There may be a timeout based on magnitude of "illegitimate" flagging or something like that.

ScottWhigham 13y ago
Yes, I've since had mine restored. However, for mine at least, it happened the day after I posted a comment much like the one above. I suspect it was manual in my case. It could be that they reviewed/changed a whole bunch of people who lost the flagging privilege around that time as well, or it could be a timeout - I don't really know. I just know that, given how quickly my flagging privileges were restored after I made a similar comment in a popular thread, it appeared to be related to my comment.
sitkack 13y ago
I actually upvoted the Snowden Ted talk story from a couple days ago to have it deleted and my karma dropped by .7 overnight. Thought that was weird. If they are going to hellban stories why not just do it with code?