Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

What does "flagged" mean in this context?

"flagged" generally means flagged by users, which is an option with enough Karma on Hacker News. Such posts will have a [flagged] tag and will not appear on the front page normally.

In this /active page, there are two posts pertaining to politics (without a direct tech angle) as user-flagged, as the Guidelines state that is off-topic.

Users with enough karma can "flag" posts and comments, which a) calls for moderator attention and b) decreases ranking. It's meant for off-topic/inflammatory/low-quality submissions.

People on Hacker News with a high enough score get a "super downvote" that can downrank a story, with enough removing it off the page entirely (flagged). It's why you won't see stories critical of Elon Musk or the current administration last for longer than an hour.

HN has had plenty of large frontpage threads fitting each of those descriptions. What we don't want is too much repetition. Otherwise the small handful of hottest topics on the internet would dominate everything else, and HN isn't that kind of site.

Lots of past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., many more available on request!

It seems like this post got killed as well, but it's the first I'm hearing of the functionality. I wouldn't say I'm a frequent user of the site, but I think I would have noticed if people were posting this link often.

“Too much repetition” of subjects you find politically incorrect, you mean.

As I've said in the past*, avoiding repetition is a core principle here and applies to every topic - especially when it's a repetitive+indignant combo. There's no political exemption.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

* (edit: to you, as it turns out!)

And as I’ve said in the past, to you, no one’s buying it. It’s obvious to everyone that the same tech and biz topics can and do appear here ad nauseum.

Indignant, though. What a joke.

Speaking as the user you responded to in the first link: I’m sure you get flak from all corners, but I (and presumably many others like me) take zero issue with your philosophy or design goals for the site. I’m with you all the way when you say you don’t want to HN to turn into a current affairs site.

The problem IMO is the current sensitivity of the filtering. You said upstream that a high enough number of upvotes could outweigh flags — but that CECOT thread was one of the top 5-10 posts of the month despite having been taken down for many hours overnight. If that wasn’t a thread where the upvotes should be a strong enough signal to override the flags, I dunno what is.

We’re asking for subtle knob tuning, not revolution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com