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Many have identified the "flag" link as a super downvote. I've seen stories fly off the front page in a matter of minutes less than an hour after being submitte
by jsmthrowaway 11y ago
Many have identified the "flag" link as a super downvote. I've seen stories fly off the front page in a matter of minutes less than an hour after being submitted due to flags. It definitely happens.
More than once I've been in a comment thread where conversation dried up, and it is because the story got flagged to page 2 and beyond. I won't list topics but the usual suspects are fairly obvious.
(I'm not complaining, but it's intriguing to me that this comment shot from +3 to 0 between refreshes.)
- bad_user 11y agoFrom what I understood many articles are flagged automatically based on certain rules, like spotting attempts of gaming the voting system. Of course it can have false positives, but I don't think there's any malice involved here. And while I agree that there have definitely been instances of articles being buried due to miss-usage of the "flag" link (which is necessary IMHO) or to overzealous moderators flagging based on certain topics, I don't remember seeing censorship because of a conflict of interest with YCombinator. Of course, I could be wrong - I used to think that Slashdot wouldn't ban negative pieces on Sourceforge either.
- jsmthrowaway 11y agoOP said "HN buries articles" without qualifying that YC is involved, and my comment followed up on that aspect without resorting to conspiracy theories. You are reading my comment in the context of nearby offtopic conspiracy fodder and have, as a result, completely misjudged my point. You even repeated and agreed with the sole point I'm making.