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Comment by cbeach | Hacker News Reader

Welcome Tom!

One thing I'd really like to see is less tactical flagging of content.

Hopefully with your additional help, people who suppress content they disagree with will be kept in check.

Open discourse is something that used to be sacrasanct in scientific and engineering circles. Over the last decade or so, free speech has been on the decline, and discussion is now very polarised along political lines.

For example, it's nearly impossible to discuss technical progress made by Elon Musk's companies without brigading by leftwing commenters, and I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away. This is self-serving behaviour by bad actors and should be addressed in order that HN is a politically-neutral forum for discussion, and not a leftwing echo chamber.

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I understand, and lament, that the world is so polarised these days. There's a limit to what we in this little corner of the web can do to correct such powerful global macro trends, but we'll continue to try our best.

If you see things that are unfairly flagged, you can email us and we'll look at them. As long as comments/submissions are within the guidelines, we'll restore them.

We want HN to be a place where people can discuss contentious topics. This is a major reason why I've moved into an expanded role here. I think HN has been, and can continue to be, one of the better places on the internet for discussing contentious topics.

The thing to remember is the guiding principle of HN is curiosity. This place is not meant to be for ideological battle, or for trying to win arguments. It's for conversations where we can learn from each other about things we're curious about.

I've always liked to learn about the opposing side of whatever position I hold. That's why I've found HN to be so valuable, and I want it to be a place people to come to for that reason for many years into the future.

How effective are vouches in this regard?

I'll do that reasonably frequently on both posts and comments, though I'm not sure how effective that is.

One sec, let's look at the endpoint ... First page (30 entries) for each shows, at this writing:

- 13 dead of 30 vouched, submissions.

- 26 dead of 30 vouched, comments.

The endpoints for the uninitiated:

  Posts:  https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE
  Comments:  https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE&kind=comment

I'll also admit that at times that's a protest vote against mod interactions as well.

(The URLs are only visible to the owner of the UID, and I presume, moderators as well.)

Vouches can help restore an item, but are just a counter weight to flags and flamewar penalties.

Flags are issued by regular users like us though. What do you expect a moderator to do, except maybe manually intervene to "un dead" something if it seems like a case of overly biased flagging? That's assuming mods have the ability to do that (I've always assumed that they do).

Flagging content should be a privilege that comes at a certain level of trust, and the privilege should be revoked by moderators for people that use flags to further an agenda.

Trust in forum users can be measured by various metrics - The Discourse forum software is a good example of how to do this: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-t...

Since it's such a powerful action, it would be nice if flaggers had to at least justify the flag. Is it breaking a site rule? Is it spam? Is it not the original source? Does it actually violate the rules, or are you just using "Flag" as a mega-downvote for articles you don't personally like?

Frankly, I'd also love to see this for downvotes.

Yeah, that's the 'receipts for everything' idea and if you think it through, you'll realize it's at a minimum impractical and more likely just an outright bad idea. Where are these 'reasons' going to go? Who is going to read them or act on them? It sort of wants to stick it to those bad flaggers and misinformed downvoters or whatever but think about it applied to you. Do you not recoil at being asked by some random web app to justify your actions? Like, we're ostensibly here for conversation not to fill out TPS report cover sheets.

This is 'drink verification can' but for messageboards.

A lot of HN mechanism makes more sense if you can accept the idea that the goal is to promote good threads, and not, as so many people believe, to promote one set of opinions over another. Requiring justification for flags would immediately crud up threads with meta-debates.

A hard thing for people to accept, something that I think is an unstated part of the HN ethos but nevertheless real, is that it's almost always better to have no thread at all than a shitty one. Important topics will inevitably get an airing in one thread or another.

Requiring justification for flags would immediately crud up threads with meta-debates.

That is true and I used to say it but the receipts people evade it with non-public receipts (which can maybe later somehow be audited). So I'm switching to dunking on the thing for its martinetism and pointless bureaucracy. It feels more self-indulgently righteous to boot!

I've taken to linking to moderator admonishments (mostly dang, occasionally pg or sctb) where I think it might be helpful, e.g.:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478913>

This is not for every flag, by a long shot, and occurs (checking my history) perhaps a few times a month.

Note that the follow-up to the above link also earned another dang cite. Few justifications are original...

The practice seems ... not too disruptive, and at least modestly effective. It also gives me a track record of who's turned up before.

Linking quips both keeps my own voice out of the discussion, and mutes the impact on the page itself.

People do get their flagging powers revoked for misuse. There was a time when I went on an overly aggressive flagging spree and my flags no longer had any effect. Months later I sent an email to hn@ycombinator.com to pledge more judicious use of flagging and to request the restoration of that power. I got it back then.

How do you know that people use flags to further an agenda? I for one both downvote and flag pretty often, but it's largely because I don't like the tone of the discourse, not because of some overarching ploy.

> I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away.

Huh, I always thought it was the other way around. Anything negative about Musk also gets quickly flagged and buried. I guess we can agree that Musk is currently a lightning rod, and brigades on both sides are acting to hide (positive and negative) coverage of his actions.

Some valid threads will get flagged because the comment section will be extremely predictable flame wars and have nothing to do with the article. That's the nature of social media. People can't help themselves. There's plenty of other social media sites for that sort of sports team drumbeating, so not much is lost by flagging some news article off the frontpage.

I will assist in reporting brigading leftist commenters. There are many of us that want to see politics out of commentary when unnecessary.

I hope people don't get punished for flagging Musk appreciation content. There's a lot that can be wrong with such submissions (cultism, uncritical praise, excessive volume, lack of substance, etc.).

> cultism, uncritical praise, excessive volume, lack of substance

All of which are subjective judgements on the content, which will naturally be reflective of a voter's political biases

You can’t eliminate subjective judgement, but cultism isn’t electoral politics, it’s about loving and adoring the guru, feeling great about how smart the guru is etc.

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