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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate that this post was unflagged, after having been flagged. But it appears not to be listed on the front page anymore, or even on /ask. Is that on purpose? If something is not flagged and is popular, what would the reason be for hiding it?

People are not discussing the underlying article here — it is just a meta-discussion about what is allowed to be discussed on HN. It's a little surprising that this is being suppressed (either by community members or mods).

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The [flagged] marker shows up on a post when there are enough flags to kill an item. Whether it's actually killed or not depends on that and a few other things, such as how active the discussion is. That's why https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27030269 shows [flagged] but not [dead].

But flags affect the ranking of a story long before they reach that fatal threshold. That's the case here. Moderators haven't done anything.

Thank you for the excellent job you do here, Dan, and for taking the time to explain decisions. I know from moderating another, much smaller community, how difficult and thankless of a task it can often be. But thank you.

Is there somewhere that the inner workings of HN upvoting, flagging and moderation are detailed so that people can understand how it all (or most of it) works?

I understand that some things you'd want to keep mum about to avoid vote manipulation.

In any case, I hope you have a great week.

Using HN Search on comments with "by:dang" and relevant words will bring up lots of past explanations. There's no document that attempts to describe everything comprehensively because I don't know that that's really possible, and it would eat my soul to try.

Thanks for the explanation. Is it only possible for people to [vouch] a submission once it is dead? If not, then it seems like posts can get caught in purgatory — not flagged enough to be dead (and therefore vouchable), but not alive enough to be seen anywhere.

In this case, it seems a reasonable compromise would be to keep the post on /ask, but let it fall off of the main front page. This is a respectful discussion about HN/moderation, and that seems appropriate for Ask.

That's accurate, except that upvotes also counteract flags, so posts don't necessarily get caught in purgatory.

Ok, it's on /ask now.

That explains why the story on Michael Lewis’ new book got sent to page 3. Seems to be controversial.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27030283

That one set off the flamewar detector.

Ahhh, I forgot about [dead]

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