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The tight restriction on down-voting is a key feature of HN and reflects the mores of the community overall. Down-voting is disrespectful and destructive - do y

by bdfh42 17y ago

The tight restriction on down-voting is a key feature of HN and reflects the mores of the community overall. Down-voting is disrespectful and destructive - do you really want another Reddit? The "flag" option brings a particular thread to the review of the moderators and (if it fails the HN relevance test) ultimately to it's removal. That's what keeps HN focused - no pictures of kittens here no matter how many people vote them up.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
Which works wonderfully well if the moderators have a balanced mix of opinions. If they start having the same opinion, perhaps that there are certain viewpoints (not topics) the community finds interesting are not interesting to them, then the system fails by way of groupthink. It works much better when material is categorized instead of flagged. Then readers can selectively choose which categories they like (instead of having a few choose for them). Moderators would then be free to re-categorize material for which they found improperly labeled.
jacquesm 17y ago
The focus of HN is - according to the guidelines - is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", pictures of kittens do not make the cut and that is not what I had in mind. The flag option does not work in the way you describe, there is a limit to the number of 'flags' that a topic can receive before it will be killed automatically without moderator intervention. This means that currently even if 50 people are discussing a topic 7 can shut it down for whatever reason they think they might have. This works fine for spam, but for subjects that satisfy the above criterium but not the personal interests of only 7 people the limit seems arbitrary, and imho just plain wrong.
- allenbrunson 17y ago
  pg posted about this awhile back. that's not the way it works anymore. if a submission has at least ten points, then it can't be auto-killed by people flagging it. of course he makes changes all the time, so it may be different by now.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Ah ok. I just lifted that bit of info from the arc 3 sources, which was iirc the latest version.

by bdfh42 17y ago

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

Which works wonderfully well if the moderators have a balanced mix of opinions. If they start having the same opinion, perhaps that there are certain viewpoints (not topics) the community finds interesting are not interesting to them, then the system fails by way of groupthink. It works much better when material is categorized instead of flagged. Then readers can selectively choose which categories they like (instead of having a few choose for them). Moderators would then be free to re-categorize material for which they found improperly labeled.

jacquesm 17y ago

The focus of HN is - according to the guidelines - is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", pictures of kittens do not make the cut and that is not what I had in mind. The flag option does not work in the way you describe, there is a limit to the number of 'flags' that a topic can receive before it will be killed automatically without moderator intervention. This means that currently even if 50 people are discussing a topic 7 can shut it down for whatever reason they think they might have. This works fine for spam, but for subjects that satisfy the above criterium but not the personal interests of only 7 people the limit seems arbitrary, and imho just plain wrong.

allenbrunson 17y ago
pg posted about this awhile back. that's not the way it works anymore. if a submission has at least ten points, then it can't be auto-killed by people flagging it. of course he makes changes all the time, so it may be different by now.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Ah ok. I just lifted that bit of info from the arc 3 sources, which was iirc the latest version.