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Comment by jakobdabo | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, for fairness, upvotes should be the vouches countering the flags. I think unless the amount of flags is really significant, they shouldn't have priority over the 117 upvoters (and counting) who are clearly interested to have this discussion here.

My thinking could be naïve, as the algorithms were probably created with the backing of some data and experience, but anyway, I felt like sharing my opinion.

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Upvotes do counter flags. It's just that in this case the flags overwhelmed the upvotes.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

In a real tug-of-war, the teams are balanced. In the HN tug-of-war, flaggers have an advantage because flagged posts are invisible to people who might otherwise upvote them.

That, and flags have more weight than upvotes.

Perhaps, but the system has been so stable for so many years that I think it's balanced enough in practice.

We aren't opposed to tweaking and testing it, but the tweaks would need to be small.

Almost any moderation system working under consistent rules will be stable, because the people and topics disadvantaged by the moderation will simply leave your platform.

Many protest that they are disadvantaged while continuing to participate.

The power of local equilibrium

I'd hazard that someone is waiting-not-waiting, like Smaug, for a systems quant (bonus: lisper) to enter the cave to do equilibrium teleportation experiments on votes and flags

(I am secretly hoping that this is a silent-smoke-out-of-ears --and not self-extinguishing-- comment)

All that would be needed is a properly sized delay to the post going dark.

A couple hours at least, would be my guess.

How does a vouch differ from an upvote in this context?

What's the reasoning for not having a vouch feature for stories like comments?

Vouching works the same way on stories and comments.

Flags having a stronger influence than upvoting is a necessary algorithmic check against genuinely bad behavior/brigading, not disagreement. In general it works as intended, which is the best you can do without something potentially worse.

> necessary algorithmic check

Are there any stats available on the weighting ratios such as flags to upvotes, likes and comments per post after flagging, average time to frontpage to flag?

(G summarises the following[0], but a definitive source would clear up what the necessary algorithmic checks are).

[0]: https://share.google/aimode/cs9cKsvGMNRHs8OG1

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