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Comment by roblabla | Hacker News Reader

> - If someone replies to this HN comment I just wrote, and I don't like it, and I can delete their comment (because there is an thread ownership concept on BlueSky, and the earliest comment is the owner);

You can hide it - which I agree is functionally equivalent to deleting it as people are very unlikely to go dig for hidden comments. FWIW this is kinda similar to "flagging" a comment on HN, which (as far as I understand) will cause it to be hidden for everyone - at least until someone vouches it back.

> - If someone links to this HN comment I just wrote, and I don't like it, I can make that hyperlink disappear, or invalidate in some way (because BlueSky is a locked API garden and hyperlinks are not plain text, but magic cloud API tokens)

You can just make the hyperlink disappear to anyone using the default BlueSky frontend. But from my understanding, the hyperlink will still be accessible through the API.

View on HN

To clarify how flagging works on HN: Flagging only hides a comment once "enough" users flag it, and even then remains visible to users with the showdead option set in their profile.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173809

Where "enough" = two accounts.

I think. I know N>1 because I sometimes flag something and it is not suppressed right away. Often though I flag something and then it is suppressed a few minutes later so I believe N=2 or N=3 or something small like that.

For that matter a lot of posts get suppressed right away, particularly from people who visit HN and immediately start posting stories from the same blog over and over again.

I think you can estimate the threshold by just counting the ratio of times you flag something and it immediately dies. You would wait a while to see which items die or do not die, and discard the subset which never die, and consider only the subset of items that transitioned to [flagged][dead].

If the [flagged] logic is simply "flags >= N", then of the subset of samples that are flag-killed with your involvement, you will be final flag in 1 of N of those.

The null hypothesis is "this experiment converges to a reciprocal integer".

I feel like this requires an assumption that any post you flag is equally likely to be flagged by other users, and at a similar time as you, in other words that your flagging behavior is very similar to others that use this feature.

I guess this might give you a pretty nice upper estimate though. Unless N is very high / very few users use the feature, and you are frequently much later to the scene as the average user of the feature. Then N may be underestimated.

Hacker News is biased so that the threshold for flagging is very low, in order to maximize the effective separation of signal from noise as much as possible (for as broad a definition of "noise" as possible.) If I had to guess it's probably 3, or it's tied to user karma (flags from higher karma accounts count more.)

And certain topics are likely to be flagged by multiple people, this can be assumed based on the topics that people complain aren't "HN worthy." Anything that can be considered politics, for instance, is probably going to get flagged because of the number of people who don't believe political stories of any kind have a place here.

Topics about US electoral politics get flagged consistently, as does anything having to do with sex, sexuality and gender.

Amazingly I see articles from Trotskyite populations often don't get flagged because, oddly, Marxism doesn't seem to be political anymore.

This post was my first in this experiment. I flagged it when it was 10 min old and was already downvoted at least once.

PS. @PaulHoule. I flagged it for valid reasons, not just to conduct this experiments, and not because it is political.

No prob. It is not like I can’t afford to lose a few points.

I think so. It depends however on how fast I think I am compared to the other flaggers. If I was really, really fast I could always be the first flagger.

That's probably a decent approximation, but it assumes the distribution of latencies for flagging is the same for you and the aggregate "everyone else."

Which is fine, since plenty people don't flag, but will vouch.

> You can hide it - which I agree is functionally equivalent to deleting it as people are very unlikely to go dig for hidden comments.

My understanding is that hidden replies are just one extra click away. From TFA: “All hidden replies will be placed behind a Hidden replies screen — so they’re still accessible, but much less visible.” Probably not much different from a collapsed subthread on Reddit.

The difference is that on actual HN, it takes more than one flag vote to hide a comment. (I suspect it's in the range 2-5, but I don't actually know.) So one person can't make a post they don't like disappear.

Also, anyone can flag a comment, not just the thread starter (I personally suspect flags from the thread starter are actually down-weighted).

HN flagging is not meant to hide people you don't want to see reply to your comments, it is meant to identify rule-breaking comments.

> The difference is that on actual HN, it takes more than one flag vote to hide a comment. (I suspect it's in the range 2-5, but I don't actually know.) So one person can't make a post they don't like disappear.

I don't know, but I would suspect if the user who wrote the parent comment flags a reply, it would be less weight than if another random user flagged it.

> which I agree is functionally equivalent to deleting it as people are very unlikely to go dig for hidden comments.

I think you're being very optimistic here.

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