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Comment by ceroxylon | Hacker News Reader

Usually things are flagged on HN for firm reasons and not emotional ones, even if the reasoning isn't transparent.

And while we are off topic, if we could get 1% of the ire of data center haters pointed at the fast fashion / textile industry, lawns or alfalfa production... we might gain some meaningful ground on sane water usage.

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Flags on HN are user submitted. they are just as emotional as reddit downvotes. If something reveals an uncomfortable truth it gets flagged.

Flags also require a minimum karma, and members with yet higher karma can also undead posts, if needed.

HN is actually surprisingly good about this, so I disagree with your assertion.

What does “high karma” have to do with less emotionally driven voting behavior?

You acquire karma through posting things that are interesting or curious enough that others upvote them.

Thus, you build reputation by acquiring karma.

It isn’t perfect, but the fact that folks with higher karma can “fix” the emotional flags of folks with lower karma, it helps.

Also, I’d recommend re-reading the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You just explained the mechanism by which the karma number goes up, not explained your theory why you think higher number means less emotional voting.

Almost all of my karma is from a single post link that blew up randomly. I think this is the case for most users' karma here.

All that does is reinforce the existing biases. If you post a lot of things other HN users agree with, you get the ability to silence things HN users don't like.

Threads that get more comments than upvotes are also automatically flagged once they reach a certain threshold.

So, on a news discussion site, active discussion gets penalised. There really should be a human in the loop on that one.

This has been done here for maybe a decade already, and it’s because it’s a signal for “unproductive” discussions.

Effectively discussions that don’t get upvotes do get penalized yes.

You forgot to mention the global dairy and meet industry, which is by far the biggest percentage of the global water usage.

That's where the alfalfa ends up.

Arguably humans need clothing and food a lot more than we need AI.

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