Comment Flagging on HN as of Late | Hacker News Reader

Comment Flagging on HN as of Late

21 pointshootbootscoot28 comments

Is it just me or is comment-flagging becoming the default means of disagreeing here? Isn't that feature supposed to be reserved for anti-socially ridiculously deliberately offensive materials that need to be removed etc?

I'm also less and less convinced about this "points voting system" in which a downvote costs the downvoting person nothing, nor is any justification necessary.

I would like to see a flag require a submitted textual reason, and downvotes require a comment postulating a coherent and logical motive, that obviously needn't be agreed-upon, but some input of some kind to raise the bar needed to damage someone.

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On a similar thread a few months ago someone commented that another discussion forum they use requires one of a handful of pre-defined reasons for a vote (both up- and downvotes). It's a simple dropdown so it doesn't add a lot of friction to voting. Different reasons have different impacts on the commenter's reputation score (for example "hate speech" has a greater penalty than "low quality" and stuff like that). I can't recall what the site was called though.

There's a pandemic on. The entire world has cabin fever and is cranky as all hell.

This is not a good time to make sweeping policy changes in reaction to people being cranky and mildly ill-behaved in their voting patterns.

Trying to make systemic changes to address this is how the world becomes more draconian. It doesn't become more civilized when you double down on "All y'all assholes better behave, damn it."

During crisis times in my life, when the kids were spazzing, my answer was usually "Go to bed and get some sleep. You're tired and cranky and we can discuss this tomorrow after you've slept."

Being more hard-line controlling instead of kind and compassionate and wise is the usual answer in situations like this. It's also the wrong answer and one of the reasons we've inherited so much crap from the past.

I have personally recently seen things a number of things flagged I really would have liked to have seen discussed. It's definitely taken seen an uptick recently.

Would you mind linking some of them?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24045615 is the most recent example and the only one I remember off the top of my head.

But what did you say? (Perhaps you can link it to pastebin or something)

I certainly see why that post was flagged. (Not only flagged, it earned a rebuke from dang, because the poster was apparently a repeat offender.) That certainly appeared to be trolling.

That said, if you disagree with the flagging, you can vouch for the post. The moderators do reconsider if people (past some threshold?) vouch for a flagged post.

In the very first reply, dang explains that the account was banned for repeated violations, so it's not just the content of that particular comment that got it flagged, but rather the account itself was banned so the comment was marked dead.

Frankly, however, if the commenter had wanted to create a discussion rather than troll, they could have used a vastly different tone. Just because there might be some interesting topic buried under the layers of sarcasm doesn't necessarily redeem it. If you want to discuss it, maybe you could elaborate on what you found interesting and post a separate response to the parent, and do so more civilly than this comment.

I missed that, dang commented that after I saw the post yesterday and I didn't bother rereading the comments today.

he is really on top of things. I wonder if he has some ML algos to help him moderate?

Who has the ability to flag comments, like is it one of those unlockable features when you hit X karma? I see that I can flag posts, but I've never seen the flag comment button.

If you click the timestamp of a comment it takes you to a page with more options. This is also where you can find the [vouch] link for comments that you think have been unfairly killed.

I think there's a small karma threshold of maybe 50 or so?

> some input of some kind to raise the bar needed to damage someone.

"Damage someone?" You're taking this too seriously.

Does flagging happen automatically (without moderation)? That is, if N users flag a post, does it get flagged? Or does it tell dang that N users have flagged it, and he makes a decision?

I myself flag posts for hostility to other users, or for blatant shilling (political or commercial). I don't think I do so for much beside those.

> Does flagging happen automatically (without moderation)?

Yes.

To add to that: not all up/downvotes are equal.

Sometimes I upvote something that I find very informative and interesting and sometimes because I mildly like it.

I personally only downvote stuff I find very hostile and/or low effort “noise”. It seems that most people do it this way. Except in cultural discussions (includes tech culture).

FWIW, I haven't noticed a significant change in flagging or downvoting comments, for the conversations I follow. However, there does seem to be a an uptick in flagging posts.

> I would like to see a flag require a submitted textual reason

Thought experiment: how could that be abused? And what would we do about that?

sql injection? escape all inputs, lol.

go on though, I'm curious.

I was thinking "this person repeated the same comment 10 times" works as well as "they mentioned pudding and i hate pudding"... The bar to click down-arrow instead of up-arrow is lower than limbo-ing under a park bench ATM, that's all...one could inadvertently do it. One could go on a spree just downvoting every comment ever. "Just you try to stop me!" etc.

What happens when the content of a downvote comment itself violates the rules?

Perhaps more nuance is called for, by having a sliding scale of rating -1 <---> +1

oooh, kudos for floating-point usage! I like it.

I largely agree. I wonder whether people should have to pay (in points?) to comment, this would demotivate people who have just have nothing of value to contribute and those who are simply trying to gain points because it would be an investment. Is that a bad idea?

+1 Same feelings, outlook and perceived quality of discourse exactly.

Couldn't agree more with the proposed countermeasures. Kudos for stepping up and proposing them.

For fucks sake. And I get downvoted for this? Are we serious?

I've been articulating the problem for months now as have others. Obviously there's no intention from the benevolent dictators of HN to change anything. That's fine. Their house, their rules. But I for one refuse to put myself through the toxicity of a troll-gutter.

I'm done here.

Bye

Agreed.

More politics, more flagging. HN is at times overwhelmingly political recently, and I'm afraid this will not get better until the election.

Has this site had any UX/UI updates in years? I've always assumed assumed it's "done" and we just have to deal with what it is. I come here less and less because of how feature-free and bad the UX is. Everything is a click to another page, then click back to what you were doing. Why do I need to go to another page to favorite an article? It causes me to hardly use the feature because it's such an interruption.

Yes, they do updates to the UI. They do them so quietly and carefully that there is a persistent delusion (or meme) that the "UI never changes."

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