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Comment by thinkingkong | Hacker News Reader

Now immediately flagged off the front page.

Sometimes things I post get flagged by users and I get it, fair enough. This time I can only think of malicious reasons.

The only people who I can imagine flagging this post are Meta PR, or users who are bringing their politics into a non-political post. If anyone has any other reasonable explanations, I would love to hear them.

Looks like the title was edited, original title: Facebook Is Censoring 404 Media Stories About Facebook's Censorship

I didn't see any such pattern in the data. It was flagged by quite a few users, none of whom showed any obvious pattern like affiliation with a company or a political slant. (Edit: I mean none of the ones I looked at. There were too many to look at them all.)

We can only guess why users flag things. In this case, I don't have a good guess, other than that the article title is baity, so I replaced it with more neutral language from the subtitle, and (partly) rolled back the flags.

The flaggers may be correct, in any case, because this thread is noticeably terrible.

Thanks for looking into it.

And yeah, I thought that this topic would have garnered a better discussion.

I'm surprised you'd think that - Facebook moderation changes and the same tired back and forth about 'free speech' have been some of the worst threads for me.

my guess would be that it's because you have to sign up to read the article.

That's actually a fair point. The good thing is that archive.is works on their site now.

Yes, although it's strangely inconsistent. Usually I see that but occasionally I don't.

(nice to see you still commenting here btw!)

hey, thanks for remembering the oldtimers!!

I check in often, but don't comment much anymore.

> We can only guess why users flag things.

I'm sure you've considered this feature, but since flagging is such a heavyweight (in terms of ranking impact) activity, shouldn't a flagger need to at least articulate (via text or a drop-down menu) why they are flagging it? Even vague choices like "Site guideline violation," "Spam," "Astroturfing," "Political flame bait" might offer some of the missing insight.

I've always resisted that, but could be persuaded. Not sure we'd get the true reasons though.

What are your concerns with that?

If it's overhead for the flagger, they could be presented with a single multi choice question, eg:

What most deserves flagging: a)item title b) item content c) hn discussion d) something else

With different users presented with different questions to build up a picture.

Flags could be recorded even if the question isn't answered, but with you reserving the right to weight ones without answers less.

Mainly the bureaucratic nature of it. Preserving HN's minimalism has been a priority because it's the kind of thing that's so easily lost; like a frog boiling itself.

Yea, I get the hesitance to invest in this. Nobody is going to select/admit reasons like "Because flagging is a mega-downvote and I don't like this story getting attention," even if it's the real reason. We don't know how accurate or actionable Slashdot's drop-down choice moderation was, either. Even if people are honest about their intentions, what is actionable? Not much I guess.

That's why following HN from a RSS feed is invaluable. You get to see everything, even the things groupthink filters out.

There’s quite a lot of trash flagged for very good reasons, though. I cannot keep up with the full feed.

I can usually power through the RSS feed pretty quickly. My reader shows only titles, so I swipe on a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem relevant. I can then take my time with the good stuff.

Indeed. Some of the most interesting stories on HN never make it past the initial filter. I've seen great posts slip by in obscurity only to get hundreds of votes and hit the front page weeks or months later. There's a lot indeterminism in what makes it to the front page(s) and what doesn't.

Keep in mind this wonderful alternate HN front-send site - it's pretty much taken over for me vs hitting HN's main page: https://hckrnews.com/

This site displays the posted links in chronological order which means stuff that suddenly got booted off the front page still shows up.

That's what I use as well. I wish I could find a good iOS client that supports that style of chronological, but front page posts.

It’s on the front page for me.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...

Whose salary in this case?

I was cheekily implying that the well paid Facebook developers flagged this article as it forces them to confront the issue that their employer is generally a bad actor, and their employment contributes to that.

Hardly a new take but I think this being flagged so quickly is a concerning problem.

I'll confess to taking it personally; apparently I still need to work on that!

Don't know if you saw my other post about this, but the flagging behavior looked normal to me. I didn't see any patterns in the flagging history of those users, such as flagging posts about FB or some political position.

> the flagging behavior looked normal to me

I believe it, I think it's clear tensions are high on these topics.

I appreciate what you do to keep us all in check so please forgive any offense my teasing caused.

Nothing to forgive, but thanks for the kind reply.

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