Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

All: this post was flagged. But it is obviously intellectually interesting and therefore on topic here, regardless of one's views on race and other issues. It's full of fascinating detail, and even has a technical aspect for the less-curious among us who only find technical things interesting. I've turned off the flags and rolled back the timestamp on the post.

We can debait the title a bit, but a substantive article with a slightly baity title is not one that should be flagged. If the title is your issue, you're welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com, or suggest a better title in the thread, which we'll happily use if we see the suggestion.

One last thing: if you're going to comment on a thread like this, can you please top up on the site guidelines first? Especially this one: Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Remember that we're going for good conversation—respectful and two-sided—rather than ideological or political battle.

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

Thanks for resurrecting this post! I also appreciate the clear guidance that "a substantive article with a slightly baity title is not one that should be flagged". Maybe this could be added to the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html?

I'm not sure, though, that it makes sense to focus on the idea that it was a "mistake" to flag this article. I think flagging is currently one of the weakest areas of the HN moderation system, in that it allows a minority to suppress discussion of otherwise good articles that they disagree with. Clearer guidelines can help, but I think you should also think hard about how the system can be changed to be more resilient to "mistakes".

Maybe flagging of articles with some minimum number of upvotes should act only as a "request for moderator review" rather than having any immediate visible effect?

Maybe there could be a way (either mandatory or optional) to explain why an article was flagged? I presume it would be easier to review a flag that says "Bad title, should be X" than just an opaque and universal flag.

Maybe there could be some better feedback for users who flag articles, to tell them if they are flagging articles "correctly"? As it is, I presume a lot of people persist in doing what they think is best, even if you think they are using the system incorrectly.

It's great that thanks to good moderation HN is still going strong after all these years. Obviously you are doing many things right! But I strongly feel that current flagging system needs to be rethought for this success to continue. Explanatory comments like the one you made here are helpful, but I think some deeper changes will also be necessary.

Ok I took out "That was a mistake." Fair point. Also, I looked at the history of the users who flagged it, and none of them had a history of flagging obviously good articles.

I don't know if the flagging system needs rethinking though. The way it works has been stable for years. I appreciate that such claims are a bit irritating, because they're based on a view of the site that not everybody gets to see. But the [flagged] marker is publicly visible, and if you or anyone sees an article in [flagged] state that ought not to be flagged—say, one whose signal/noise ratio is as high as the OP or better—then please tell us (hn@ycombinator.com is best, because that way we're sure to see it). You especially, because we know how much and how sincerely and for how long you have cared about open discussion on this site.

Posts can be intellectually stimulating yet not belong on this site. What's important about a submission to users is a lot more nuanced, and I absolutely see why it was flagged. A slightly baity title on the wrong topic generally causes a derailed comment section since the title primes how you interpret the article(and many uses don't read the article).

For example, consider a post about the political analysis of the changing voting habits of Congress. The post is great, it is filled with technical details and an explanation on the application of game theory on voting habits in Congress, yet it is titled "Racism in the American Political System along Party Lines." The title enough is alone to disqualify such a post here IMO as it would in itself cause a dumpster-fire of a comment section, or at least have a much higher likelihood of it.

Fair points as well. And sure, the title is by far the strongest influence on a new thread. But there are other ways, as I mentioned, for users to request a title change, and if they're flagging an article based on title alone without looking at the text, that's not good.

I appreciate how the moderation call could seem non-obvious in this case, even though it was obvious to me. Here's the most important thing: people shouldn't just flag every divisive article. It depends on the quality of the specific article. We don't want HN to be taken over by political battle. But we also don't want to sanitize it of social issues, because it would be less intellectually interesting that way, and that is the entire point of the site. Here's a good question to ask when deciding whether to flag: what is the information-to-indignation ratio of the article? If it's high, don't flag it. I wrote about this the other day, for anyone who wants more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19720659.

What prompted me to comment publicly in the current case is that the article was high in information and low in indignation—surprisingly low, considering where the author is coming from. Which makes the article even more interesting, btw—any time an article defies expectation for its genre, that's good for HN.

Thanks for this comment. I tend to flag "every divisive article" myself, and maybe I'll resist that a bit more now.

Essentially what I use HN for is the comment discussion. So for me, the main thing to look at is whether an article will generate a good discussion. Saying "I don't actually care if the article is good" is not exactly true, but it's also not that far off: a well-written article that generates a bad discussion is still a bad thing IMO.

Whereas someone who uses HN as just a news aggregator may have the opposite thought -- the comments don't matter, all that matters is the article quality.

I agree—but your comment omits something important, which is that article quality also conditions comment quality. It's a reciprocal loop. To get the most out of it means watching for quality articles that otherwise might fall through the cracks, and it also means coaxing threads to rise to a higher quality level instead of collapsing into default sludge.

This submission is a good example to make the point; it sits just on the interesting edge. That's why I've spent so much time commenting in this thread: not because I know anything about the social implications of photography tech, but because it reveals something about how HN can get better.

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