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Comment by JustExAWS | Hacker News Reader

I flag submissions even when I agree on the topic. Basically any topic where I can’t see the comments as enhancing someone’s knowledge and will just be politics and whataboutism.

Before the usual retorts come that I can only afford to think that way because I’m not a member of a “disaffected group”, my still living parents dealt with the Jim Crow south and my son who grew up in the suburbs all of his life still got looked at with suspicion walking around in our neighborhood.

But that doesn’t mean I want to see a dozen post a day about police brutality, BLM, the inequities in the justice system or whatever anti woke BS Trump was talking about today on HN.

What possible good discussion could come out of a post about Palestine vs Israel unless it was a technical “innovation” [sic] that one side or the other was using?

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But the exact reason for flagging per-person is kind of orthogonal to this request right? It's a request for transparency. You are able to override other people's interest in discussing topics for no real personal cost. Is there any drawback to you having those flags be on the public record? Or any reason not to make those flags public? Why exactly should flagging be private.

I think a lot of people agree with your reasons for flagging and wish politics didn't cross over into tech, but that doesn't really impinge either way on making flags public. (In the example article that prompted this a debate about the relative benefits of different vaccine research approaches seems patently tech/science based, but again it is not really relevant to a proposal to make the flags public record).

For better or worse, HN is a moderate site. If anything, the moderators should protect submissions from being flagged if they think it is unfair or the system itself should stop things from being flagged if it has been “vouched” for, or upvoted by HN users with high karma.

I'm not actually sure what the karma threshold is for flagging, I've already crossed it on this which is my alt account.

Perusing active at the moment it looks like a fairly quiet time for flagging, though the example didn't get to active so it's a lopsided sample. The flagged articles are roughly:

- UBI doesn't work because the poor are lazy

- 2 different aliens/UFOs related articles

- Zohran Mamdani and reaction of tech scene in NYC

- Israeli settler violence in the west bank

I don't really see a compelling argument that any of these except perhaps west bank violence is worthy of a flag. We have tools to deal with these topics already such as the front page fall off for flame wars. I don't think the site is enhanced by flagging in it's current state and absent a larger change like increasing the flag karma to be closer to vouch karma so recovery is less lopsided, I think at least being transparent about flagging helps restore confidence in the system and would help reduce conspiracy thinking.

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