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Comment by lnxg33k1 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why it’s not possible to downvote posts, I’d have saved someone else from killing his own braincells too by reading this article, instead I could not contribute to the mental health of a fellow specimen, sorry random stranger, not my fault

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Flags downrank submissions and in that sense work like downvotes.

Normally we downweight articles like this but when YC or a YC startup is the story, we err on the side of moderating less - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

I read dang and thought I was being given another yellow card :look: thanks

I hate to disagree here Dan, but I tried revisiting this article a while back, and in spite of being posted only 8 hours ago, with a reasonable number of comments and up votes, the discussion was nowhere to be found in the first five pages of HN. That leaves me questioning if what you said actually takes place, or whether there is a mechanism for YC to make sure to sanitize the feed to their preference.

What you observed is so within the normal range of HN's functioning that there's a FAQ entry dedicated to it:

  Q: Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?

  A: You can't derive rank from votes and time alone. See "How are stories ranked?" above.

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

In this case, the post dropped in rank because of user flags.

Understood. Is the flagging mechanism based on relative counts or absolute numbers? I think the latter mechanism would be extremely flawed.

I don't understand your question - can you put it differently?

So let's say we have a post with 110 upvotes and 40 comments, as well as 30 flags (i.e. 150 post interactions and 30 flagdowns, or a 1:5 ratio of flagdowns to interactions), and another with 27 upvotes, 13 comments and 20 flags (i.e. 40 post interactions with 20 flags, or a 1:2 ratio of flagdowns to interactions).

The second one is clearly more relatively flagged down than interacted with, even though it was flagged less. This could mean that the topic was clearly against the guidelines for glaring issues. On the other hand, the first could very likely be a controversial topic of discussion with clearly redlined sides (like the recent Jacobin mag article on men's health), or (unlikely but possible) that a swarm of company Z employees could have zealously flagged down the post because of its critical nature against company Z.

In an absolute flagging system, the first article would be flagged, by virtue of having the higher number of flags. In a relative flagging system, the second article would be flagged.

I assume that you hold final authority on which flagged posts actually get flagged and which stay. I hope it's not another decision that's been relegated to an algorithm in the background.

Ok, in those terms, HN's flagging system is relative, not absolute.

Given the option people downvote without reading quickly creating an Ecco chamber. There’s a flag function which serves a similar purpose but the extra effort lets a lot of more marginal content slip through.

You want more diverse content because it attracts a more interesting audience. There’s several mechanisms to promote this. “Health risks of travel in early-modern Britain” only has 35 upvotes in the last 6 hours but still ranks #17 because diversity is encouraged.

Another story is talking about remnants of a structure dating back “476,000 years and predating the evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens” https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2023/09/20/archaeologists-disco...

There both interesting but so is “Fine-grained caching strategies of dynamic queries” etc etc.

Yeah I think it won’t be against diversity, or it is not, just keep diversity within the boundaries of what the overall community would like, I mean, there is nothing about Kim Kardashian, because I suppose it would be too much diversity? Flagging I think helps to shape or better, contain, the diversity?

I don't think anyone cares about Kim Kardashian, except if she actually would have broken the Internet

Pretty sure it's an HN trope to read some of the comments before the article, in part to get a sense of the quality of the article.

So, your duty was done.

What is wrong with the article? It seemed to be a fairly normal piece, certainly not "braincell killing"

This could be a good feature if there's clear guidelines on what's off-topic or undesirable by some criteria. Seems more tricky than downvoting comments which works pretty well for keeping discourse civil as interests and what's interesting is very subjective. I do like systems that have a controverserial section if it doesn't attract content by its own nature.

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