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Comment by jxcole | Hacker News Reader

There is absolutely no justification for flagging this. I am disheartened that hacker news has become a place where people flag stuff they dislike rather than posting a rebuttal. I feel this is a systemic error, it is currently too easy for a few people to kill articles they don't like.

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Patent advocates are outnumbered by practitioners who are virulently anti-patent by at least 100-1 on HN. Who would be flagging an article like that off in bad faith?

To the responses: the whole point of hacker news is to have a culture where upvoting is the only form of vote. If you want something to sink to the bottom the only thing you are supposed to do is not vote for it. Flagging is reserved for spam or other stuff that violates HN policies.

If that were true, then flagging would not sink things to the bottom. I click the buttons that do what I want, not ones that are supposed to do what I want.

This is why we can't have nice things.

No, the refusal to make the effort to design well allowing for this is why we don't have nice things.

I'm pretty sure pg doesn't post the criteria being marked "dead", but I thought I'd heard one time that it took ~10 flags for it to happen.

After my original post to the petition was killed, I thought I had done something wrong linking directly to the petition...as if that was some sort of spam (e.g. linking to an article about a product vs. linking to the actual product page seems to be the norm here as most direct-to-product links come off as spammy).

I'm assuming good faith about the whole thing, but think that it's an interesting gray area ripe for community discussion.

If the flagging is intentional, I agree. But it is also ridiculously easy to accidentally flag an article in a mobile browser on a touchscreen device. I have to wonder how many illegitimate flags come in that way.

I've done that at least half a dozen times on my Desire. It would be nice if the "flag" button were off to the side, away from the other links, or if there were a dialogue to confirm your flagging. Or if there were an "unflag" button.

>It would be nice if . . . there were an "unflag" button.

Uh, there is: when you click on "flag" it turns into "unflag", and when you click on that, it turn back into "flag".

Oh, it does, too. I don't know how I couldn't have noticed that. I always curse not having that whenever I fat finger "flag".

Flagging is a way to sink an item from the front page. I suspect that if there were a way of doing it without killing an item (say, have a per-user 'hide' option for each item), the flagging rampage would subside.

There's no way to downvote other than to flag. Making a rebuttal doesn't make the article go away, it does the opposite.

Please do not do this. You are not entitled to inflict your negative opinion of something on everyone else.

That's the point. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it isn't worthy of discussion. Only flag something if it violates an HN policy.

I flag something if I don't want to see it on HN. I don't care strictly what HN policy says or not. I want to influence HN and HN policy. I don't want to play pedantic games with written language. Language is a fuzzy echo of intent. I care about intent.

It's a fairly selfish view to distort a feature designed for abuse into a feature for your personal preference. Thought processes like that lead to the collapse of great communities.

If you want to influence HN, you should submit and upvote stories you prefer like the site was designed for.

Inflicting an implicit form of censorship on a website to do away with threads you don't agree with is anathema to grown-up, intellectual discussion.

I'm just one of the naïve newbies speaking out here but if you don't like something, either enter the discussion with your reasons thus or ignore it and move on.

And just to prove my point, I could flag your post without thinking twice about it. But that's not in the spirit of discussion and is a negative influence.

Your reasoning only works if you nobody ever upvotes anything either — because if downvoting is anathema to rational discussion because it buries that article, upvoting must also be bad because it buries other articles. Your argument is essentially against voting in general. But HN is a voting-based site, so if you are really that strongly against non-conversational signals, it simply isn't a good match for you.

Having an article buried simply because it wasn't popular enough to stay on the front page isn't exactly analogous to going out of your way to ensure an article is buried by flagging it.

I choose to comment before I upvote anything, that's how I roll, but on that basis I can argue that the former constitutes a contribution while re-appropriating another button to serve the purpose of a downvote contributes nothing. If the former is the means to encourage discussion then the latter is the means to discourage it.

No, they're both means to encourage discussion on the topics you'd like to see it on. The front-page is a zero-sum game. When you upvote some things but not others, you are pushing those other things down just like if you downvoted (and when you downvote, you're pushing other things up just like if you'd upvoted!). In fact, going down the page the article is on and upvoting every other story is roughly equivalent to a downvote. My sister used to employ this technique to "downvote" American Idol contestants she found particularly obnoxious.

Downvoting is precisely as valuable as upvoting. They're both ways of saying that some things are more worthy of discussion than other things. The fact that 100 people like something does not make it good or even popular. 100,000 people might think it's an awful topic, or an awful presentation of the topic. If they all agreed on a single article that is better, they could upvote that, but if they just feel the article is particularly bad relative to all other articles, they have no recourse but a mass-upvote, which (besides being burdensome) means they then can't upvote any articles they find especially useful.

To illustrate what I'm saying: If we all agreed never to bury an article that somebody voted for, 100 NASCAR fans (an insignificant number both as a percentage of HN users and a percentage of NASCAR fans) could completely transform HN into a NASCAR fansite by bloc-upvoting articles relevant to their interests. That would be a horrible outcome.

An article about Jimmie Johnson is less appropriate to HN than all the other articles on the front page right now, and the way people register that opinion is by flagging.

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