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Comment by nuker | Hacker News Reader

Have a look at my post about Smoking scenes on Netflix TV shows. It is wild :))

Sounds like you think it's an unusual curve, but it's not really. Once a post hits the front page it attracts the attention of users, or moderators, that might flag a post. Multiple flags demotes a post. Maybe because they don't think it's interesting enough, it has a clickbaity title, is ragebait, the discussion has descended into flame war, or for a variety of other reasons. The post then drops sharply. It happens fairly frequently, and might perhaps happen to this one too, because it could attract shallow, bordering on paranoid, discussions about the moderation of the site.

> Sounds like you think it's an unusual curve, but it's not really.

I know you are correct. But I also smell Big Tobacco conspiracy, not with HN, but with Netflix. Where can I see number of flaggings?

> Where can I see number of flaggings?

It's not revealed in the UI anywhere AFAIC

Why do you think HN does not expose flaggings data?

Largely because those that would find it of most use are looking to sidestep being flagged. eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Ranmalie

( You'll need Showdead: ON in user options to see most of those comments, they're flagged, dead, and spamming a dodgy cryto scheme )

Yes, but it also hurts transparency, being treated fair and expose any foul play. I think full transparency, who flagged what and when, as a dataset, will be beneficial. HN became important source of truth, there is not many like it.

Or drop flagging as a feature completely. Looks easier :)

HN became important source of truth

Treating HN this way is a misunderstanding of its goals and would make HN much worse. 'nerd messageboard with less yelly conversation' is about as good as one can hope for the actual aspirational goal of 'place for curious conversation'.

Mine got a pretty similar ride: https://hnrankings.info/39741565/

Probably because listy stuff doesn't work well as an HN post:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It's an undated post of a two year old blogspammy summary thing of a single study by an advocacy group. As HN submission quality goes, it's not very high so if you are interested in having the topic discussed, you probably need to find some more interesting material.

Yeah it might be what I shared on a sibling comment: HN hates posts with comments > upvotes. When that threshold is crossed, HN flags it as controversial topic and deranks it.

Or maybe it's been manually flagged, so who knows.

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