Ask HN: Logics Behind Flagging Xinjiang Victims Database | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Logics Behind Flagging Xinjiang Victims Database

6 pointsdemetrius5 comments

Hello! How does flagging work on this website?

For example, I've just seen Xinjiang Victims Database flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37273507

This is an important project led by a person I know: the author, Gene Bunin, used to be active on tatoeba.org, adding Uyghur sentences. I had a chance to have a lot of conversations with him back then. He self-taught Uyghur and visited Xinjiang in the past, when it was safer to do so, and he is keeping that database because he sincerely cares about Uyghur people.

Why was the submission of his website flagged?

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Hi demetrius, interesting to know that Gene Bunin used to be on tatoeba.org, small world :)

Flagging here works by people clicking on the "flag" button until an unknown threshold is reached and the post is marked as [flagged] and is hidden from everyone who doesn't have "showdead" enabled in their profile. People who disagree can click "vouch" to undo the flagging.

So in general it is not really possible to give a single reason why something was flagged, but in this case I suspect that people thought this post would result in a flamewar instead of an intelligent discussion and flagged it preemptively.

yorwba covered the basics, but I'll add that users who flagged this also flagged "A girl who turns into bone while her identical twin remains healthy", "The world is watching in disbelief as France tears itself apart", "Why work on crypto", "Telling your inner critic to chill", "Why is the Javascript ecosystem like this?", and "The deep weirdness of beavers" (links below) - so I think the bulk of the reason is that people thought it was off topic for HN.

I did see 2 or 3 users who appeared to be flagging stories for political reasons. When we see that, we remove flagging privileges from the account.

"The Deep Weirdness of Beavers" is certainly on topic for HN and we also remove flagging privileges when we see accounts flagging too many submissions like that. Unpredictable-but-interesting submissions are the best things here, not the worst.

By contrast, sensational/indignant posts on politically charged topics are all too predictable, leading to repetitive and eventually nasty discussion. That's mostly why users flag them, and they're mostly right to do so, although there are sometimes exceptions and we sometimes turn off flags on those.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36769469

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36566507

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36487742

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34439883

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34250969

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33913113

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

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

I'd say that such a database puts this submission under the "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" exception. While Xinjang isn't completely new, a database of evidence is much more interesting than the average Xinjang article.

>I'd say that…

The people that flagged the article apparently disagreed. If you have enough karma you can counter the flagging by vouching.

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