Ask HN: Do you flag HN posts in the absence of a downvote button?

6 points·mangeletti··7 comments

I reserve flags for things which manifestly shouldn't be on HN. If it's something I would simply prefer lower on the page, waiting a while generally suffices.

No. You should not flag stories as a way to down-vote them. If you do that regularly, you will lose your flagging privileges.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>"If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)"

You can also flag duplicate submissions. Lots of people submit the same article as one that's already being discussed on the front page (or an essentially identical article from a different source), or an article that was submitted dozens of times a couple of days ago and actively discussed.

(HN's dupe detector only catches duplicates that have exactly the same URL.)

What's the current karma to get the downvote button ?

I believe it's 500, but you can only downvote comments, not articles.

I just reached 501 karma and I can't see any download button. The threshold must have been raised again.

Edit: I am starting to see them now, but only on some posts. I suspect there is some kind caching. In any case the threshold is definitely still 501.

You need a karma of 30 to see the flag / vouch buttons. Click the timestamp of a submission or post to see those.

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