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Comment by sjs382 | Hacker News Reader

I keep a few ways to contact me in my HN profile.

I often flag submissions or comments when they go against the rules (sometimes written, sometimes unwritten) of the site.

I'm generally not willing to:

  * engage with someone who's demanding an audience for a post/comment (upset that their post/comment was flagged). 
  * justify these flags to a stranger. 
  * open myself to harassment based on what I flag.

So, if these flags become public, I'll just stop flagging. I'm sure I'm not alone. I consider this a negative outcome of making flags public.

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Thanks for providing some food for thought on the specifics of the proposal. These are real and justified drawbacks. My interest is more in access to the flagging behavior in aggregate rather than campaigns against any specific person. But this being the internet it certainly creates a new avenue for deranged people to kick off. However does the risk of this hypothetical hate campaign:

a) exceed the likelihood of people doing this via commenting anyway

b) justify the opaque and powerful nature of flagging as-is

Perhaps you stopping flagging if you're not willing to justify a flag is a good outcome in aggregate? We have mods to kill threads which violate the guidelines already. But looking at the /active list there's certainly an amount of (probably organic) censorship of controversial threads in either direction (though my gut feel is it biases more towards censorship of articles about the latest outrages of US government).

I'm not really interested in say, Ruby, I think people should probably use languages which are type-safe if they want to avoid catastrophes in production and 1am pager calls. However if I see an article about Ruby I'm just going to not engage with it. Perhaps your existing interpretation of the unwritten rules is too broad and actually we ought to rein in the amount of flagging anyway?

We're in total disagreement. I say "yes" to both "a" and "b" and I do not think that people flagging less is a good outcome. Same goes for vouching.

I think a lot of us are generally happy with how the site operates—that's why we're here. I personally consider the moderation to be a feature—I think dang and team do a great job. I'm sure you could pick out some counterexamples but comments and posts that rise to the top tend to be thoughtful. There are exceptions. Nobody bats 1.000.

Posters don't have a right to be seen/read. That said, there are plenty of other communities that will embrace the types of posts/threads that would get flagged here.

If you have specific concerns about specific comments/stories getting flagged, it's reasonable to take each one up with the moderation team privately (there's a contact link in the footer). Just don't badger them—becoming a nuisance won't help you achieve your goals.

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