Ask HN: Why isn't a reason for flagging a submission required | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why isn't a reason for flagging a submission required

3 pointscebert7 comments

I was curious if anyone knows why HN doesn’t require a justification to be given when flagging a submission. For example, I routinely see submissions posted when cloud services are down. Tonight I posted Peloton’s status page when there services were down a second time today, and my submission was immediately flagged (https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=39098237).

I find it quite irritating that your submissions can be anonymously flagged with no justification given. There’s also no way to dispute the flag.

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From the HN Guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.[1]

A posting saying some service is down doesn't have any intellectual content. Just because people post these all the time doesn't mean they're on-topic.

Also, if someone depends on a service, they probably don't need HN to tell them the service is down. They can easily check the status page themselves, and the status page will probably be more up-to-date than the HN post.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Well, they definitely have clarification there on down status. It does seem like it would be helpful to be able to specify a reason for a flag.

You can, and people do, dispute flags by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

"Foo is down" posts tend to be offtopic because (a) there are so many of them, and any kind of repetition makes a story less interesting for HN; and (b) as minimaxir pointed out already, there's usually no other information than "Foo is down", so there's no basis for a substantive thread. People then end up arguing either generically about Foo, or they get mad about flaws in the status page or something.

What is interesting and tends to do well on HN are the post-mortems that sometimes show up after an outage, explaining what happened.

Peloton's status page isn't a good submission. Nothing really to dicuss.

Then why are other down status submissions commonly accepted?

You got bad luck. If you get a modest amount of karma you can flag the other fella who posts a down notification for Facebook or something.

Seriously if you want to understand what gets flagged on HN, turn on the “showdead” flag on your profile and you will see a whole lot of submissions that most people won’t see.

I suggest that you avoid getting emotional about your submissions. The same links you submitted will die, but someone else submitting it after a few hours or a day or two will get voted on by many others.

Try not to single out “your submissions” or a particular company/entity while trying to find a reason -- there may be no specific reason.

Best of Luck.

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