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defrost

Because in the past nine hours some number of HN users clicked on the [flag] option under the submission title.

That is literally all it takes to mark a submission [flagged].

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flagging should come with a 50 word minimum explanation.

Or a drop down of appropriate flagging reasons.

Some of the juiciest discussions on this forum recently are the perma-flagged posts with active comments and high upvotes. The moderation bias (by supposed "crowd" or not) is obvious, there are clear tendencies of suppressed topics. It's like the dark side of the front page.

I'm not interested in promoting or exploring juicy discussions.

I'm just interested in some transparency: when I select "flag" I want to say why: a) this isn't a tech story b) this story is just self-serving advertising c) this story appears to have gamed itself to the front page d) this story is just a sign up page (I consider that misleading). e) the story doesn't match the headline, etc.

If I see a story flagged, I'd like to know why (headline doesn't match, self-promotion, etc).

That would allow the rest of us to know the why.

That would assume good faith. It wasn't flagged in good faith so all you'd get access to is how bad faith actors construct narratives.

Bad-faith narrative constructs should at least lay bare their bad faith.

And require public scrutiny and reputation risking, I agree. Flags are louder than comments yet require no risk. It's a systemic bias against discussion.

It's one possibility but what happens to these political threads is, more likely, auto-flag due to having more downvotes than comments. This always catches redditors by surprise because, I figure, on Reddit it's an encouraged behavior.

Is there any comment from dang or tomhow on such auto flagging?

Not that I doubt you, it's just that I've only seen them talk about explicit flagging from users and weighting factors, which number of comments, number of downvotes, and comment tree shape fall under.

Political topics get a lot of user flagging and used to get a lot of explicit comment from users about their flagging because its politics which is understandable given such topics are almost always prominent in the mainstream media coverage.

Not sure about tomhow, but dang (and sama before him) commented on this many times, it's called "flamewar detector" if you want to search. Here is the first link I've found: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232311 (here he does not say it's flagged, just demoted so I might be misremembering, but I am pretty sure I read that it can flag too).

That's as I remember, flame war and rapid short volatile exchange detection leading to down ranking weighting .. I had the impression that explicit [flagging] was the visible mechanism for explicit core user disapproval (for inclusion, not necessarily of specific content) and kept separate from the invisible hand of algorithmic weights.

The repeated takeaway I see is that they are still open for discussion on aspects of all that:- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39233617

It still boggles the mind why anyone would flag it.

I mean I get it if you were someone that is a part of the mass spying campaign, but I suspect there are none on HN.

Yes and no - there are people with a strong political bias one way or another on HN that will flag politics that they don't like. There are also a great many that just don't like any political submissions on HN and particularly not ones that are getting mainstream media attention on other feeds that they might see.

I'm interested in both technology and more and more often the uses and consequences of technology which unavoidably drifts in the political sphere.

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