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Comment by xgi | Hacker News Reader

You said "bulk of the community" twice here, what does that mean? Are you claiming that most users don't want to see these threads, and that the flagging system represents it? With how quickly threads get flagged (and seeing how they can even stay on /active for a day or 2 after being flagged) there is clearly not a reasonable quorum of users making these decisions.

I understand that a large number of users choosing to talk about a topic does not mean the topic should remain on HN (which I believe you've said before). But I'd like to see more evidence before you say what the "bulk of the community" wants.

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Yes, by "bulk" I simply mean majority.

> With how quickly threads get flagged (and seeing how they can even stay on /active for a day or 2 after being flagged) there is clearly not a reasonable quorum of users making these decisions.

Those seem like non sequiturs to me. There are a lot of users flagging the posts. Many (not all) are legit users who flag for the right reasons. I know that because I look at their history and see what else they flag.

If you see threads that you think should not stay flagged, you're welcome to let us know about them at hn@ycombinator.com. As I've explained above and in many other places, we're willing to turn the flags off under certain conditions, such as: the thread isn't disastrous, the article contains significant new information, and there hasn't been too much similar material recently.

The current thread, though, is a good example of when we wouldn't turn flags off. This kind of shallow-indignant discussion is not what HN is for.

Thanks for what you do, dang.

But that is not only what is happening from the moderation side is it?

Accounts with years of history, solid karma, and virtually no record of missteps are suddenly being throttled—limited in the number of stories they can post and even in their ability to reply within discussions.

It appears that merely having a story flagged is enough to trigger these constraints. So, if these users weren't throttled before, what changed?

Are they simply falling victim to brigading?

And isn't it a striking irony that fresh accounts, even those with provocative names like "gulfofamerica," can comment freely while long-standing contributors are being throttled?

> Accounts with years of history, solid karma, and virtually no record of missteps are suddenly being throttled

We rate-limit accounts when we see them posting too many low-quality comments and/or getting involved in flamewars. Those are missteps.

> It appears that merely having a story flagged is enough to trigger these constraints.

That's definitely not the case.

> So, if these users weren't throttled before, what changed?

Nothing changed. The moderation practices around rate-limiting have been the same for many years.

> Are they simply falling victim to brigading?

No. "Brigading" implies groups of third-party users, and actions by such accounts have no effect on rate limits.

> And isn't it a striking irony that fresh accounts, even those with provocative names like "gulfofamerica," can comment freely while long-standing contributors are being throttled?

When people see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't, they frequently feel that the mods must secretly endorse it, but by far the likelier explanation is just that we didn't see it. HN has far too much content for us to read it all, and we can't moderate what we don't see. That might be regrettable but it's not a "striking irony", just a mundane limitation.

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

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Btw, if you're asking about your own account, the problem is that you've been using HN primarily for political battle, which is not only (1) against the site guidelines and (2) the sort of thing we rate limit accounts for, but (3) is actually a line at which we ban accounts (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for lots of past explanations). You've also been breaking the site guidelines in other ways.

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

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