Suggest HN & PG: Fix the flag button
It seems like a good idea at first glance. Unfortunately, it instead ends up stifling discussion by allowing a limited cadre of people to remove posts that, while still interesting to most of us, they don't like. The most notable recent example is the rapid flagging of positive Surface Pro reviews, which consistently showed up below posts that had less upvotes and had been around longer.
It has a few main problems:
- Anyone can do it.
- A flag seems to negate more than one upvote.
- Flags are consistently used to silence discussion that some people don't like.
There have been several popular pleas recently to stop using the flag button inappropriately. While these may have had some effect, some people will continue to use it inappropriately, no matter how much we ask them not to. The flag has good intentions, but it's simply used as an extra-powerful downvote by many.
There are two immediately obvious solutions:
- Remove the flag button entirely.
- Add a significant karma threshold to the flag button. Since high-karma HN users are more likely to be active on the forum anyway, a small number of high-karma users can keep the spam off the site, while preventing a small number of users from preventing the community from organically choosing these to prominently display.
These fixes will not overrun HN with spam for the following reasons:
- Most users only see the frontpage. It already takes a large amount of upvotes in a short amount of time to reach the front page, and spam wouldn't generally achieve that.
- Spam generally doesn't show up on the new submissions page, indicating it's not being submitted that much in the first place.
- The moderators are quite vigilant when it comes to high-profile content. This can be readily seen by their constant retitling of posts that hit the front page. The tiny amount of spam that might hit the front page would be easily and quickly squashed.