Ask PG: How Critical Should I Be? (meta - flagging) | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: How Critical Should I Be? (meta - flagging)

41 pointsjcr20 comments

I'm definitely in the "up-vote the good stuff" camp, but contributing to HN includes the far less enjoyable tasks of occasionally down-voting and flagging.

I know HN employs an "excessive flagging" threshold to prevent abusive flagging (pg mentioned this eons ago, but I can't find the link). The "Enough rope to hang yourself" design works well with engaged users who care about the quality of HN, but the design seems to break down when there's too much bad stuff to flag/down-vote. The most obvious break down is when emotions run high on some topic, and we're flooded with bad comments, throw-away trolling accounts, and redundant but up-voted submissions. But on everyday terms, if I was to flag every single violation of the site guidelines I see in the /newest queue, I'd very quickly hang myself on the anti-abuse code.

Even seemingly well-intentioned people get hung by the anti-abuse code:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454106

Too much of a good thing is often bad, and a well-intentioned person with an itchy mouse finger could easily flag too much. At present, there's just no way to know where the "too much" line is, or what kind of infractions should be flagged.

pg, could you provide more guidance on what you want to be flagged?

I've got a few ideas for potential ways to provide feedback on good/bad flags to users in their profiles without spoiling the anti-abuse code. I could either email them to you or post them up in the "Feature Request" thread where they belong.

p.s. Also could you please add "gossip" and "X is down" messages to the list of off topic stuff in the site guidelines?

On the forums I run I have the policy that to flag something is an exceptional thing... and that when it happens it's because something exceptional has occurred.

I feel that the whole flagging system is for two reasons:

1) Legal enforcement against illegal material: child porn, hate material, etc.

2) The way in which the community communicates to me the community standards... where the subjective line of acceptability is

In the first instance, I only receive a couple of flags a year even on a community with 250k actives per month.

On the second, I receive a flag every day or two.

Flags generate emails to all of the admins and moderators, it's a "drop things and look at this" event.

When we receive a flag we will ignore it if: The person is an habitual flagger (over-sensitive), or the person always flags the subject of the flag (chip-on-shoulder/bias).

We're attempting to listen to and gently adjust the subjective acceptable standards that are communicated to us, but without introducing a system in which a small number create a wild amount of vocal bias.

Hence... if someone flags often, they lose their ability to flag as they're creating disproportionate noise in the feedback mechanism.

So long as people on the communities I run reserve the flag for the truly exceptional and unacceptable, then everything works well.

Now, assuming similar intent in the system exists here, I'd say it's best to avoid flagging unless it's essential to flag.

Thanks for the input. Great points.

The flagging system on HN shares some similar aspects to the ones you mentioned (congrats on 250K active users!), but in many ways, it's a completely different system and has a slightly different intent. It only takes a few flags from established users for new submission to be marked [dead] and invisible to most people, save those who have "show dead" enabled in their profile. In this sense, HN flagging is designed to crowd-source the task of removing spam, abuse, and off-topic material from the site.

Essentially, flagging is community cleanup, and it's the reason why the flag link is so prominent... --You probably remember when the front page didn't have flag links. For a long time, only the /newest page had easily accessible 'flag' links. The change of putting 'flag' links on the front page was made because junk kept getting up-voted onto the front page, and since most people didn't know how to flag (by visiting the 'link' link), the result was discussions about inappropriateness.

Flags on HN work differently than what you described. If you flag something and it gets flagged by enough other people (tempered by anti-abuse ring flag/vote detection) to be marked [dead], then it was a "good" flag. Similarly, if you flag something and not enough others flag it to become [dead], then it was a "bad" flag. The more "good" flags you make, the more weight is given to them, and of course, the more "bad" flags you make, the less weight is given to them.

(NOTE: Above I'm paraphrasing something pg posted eons ago, and I can't find the link, so I might not have the details perfect, and the details may have changed since then.)

Also, flags reduce rank in the HN sorting, but exactly how flags reduce rank is undisclosed (contra-factor --see pg's second post here):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417

If you flag something, and it does not go [dead], your flag still has some effect, but the details of whether said flag is "good" or "bad" are unknown. All I can say for sure is if something is highly up-voted, and also heavily flagged (i.e. controversial), it sinks down the ranking and off the front page very quickly even if it is never marked [dead].

It's a very clever design, reduces the workload on mods/admins, and enables you to do some other interesting stuff...

Most of the details are not public, but I'd bet PG uses the good/bad ratio to determine things like the per-user threshold value where flagging is disabled for a user. I also suspect it would take some other count and/or good/bad threshold of flags per-submission or per-post for admins/moderators to be bothered with any kind of alert. Why bother the mods/admin when enough known-good users have flagged it to [dead]? These two points are pure speculation on my part, but having the good/bad flag ratio per-user allows you to lighten the workload on mods/admins.

Of course, pg not elaborate on the anti-abuse code, and I sincerely doubt he will neither confirm nor deny anything I've said publicly because he just can't without jeopardizing the effectiveness of his anti-abuse code. (Yes, I'm intentionally giving him an out).

On the other hand, having PG provide a bit more instruction on what he wants flagged could be really useful to the users watching the /newest queue, prevent well-intentioned folks from unnecessarily triggering the abusive-flagger threshold, and at the same time, help improve the quality on HN.

This is a good point. It happened to me for one of my very occasional HN posts, in which I presented our startup idea to HN for feedback. It was flagged for no apparent reasons while on front page top, and this impaired quite a lot its visibility. I'm not implying there were any deliberate malicious attempts, or organized obscure interests, behind flagging it, but as of today, I can't understand why it was. It would perhaps be useful to include a mandatory short motivation whenever you are flagging a post, which may be automatically delivered to authors' HN profile, so that they may be able to more easily understand the reasons behind the report.

I tripped this flagging threshold a while back, flagging submissions which I thought were offtopic for HN. Alas, no more "flag" links for me. Apparently, one shouldn't flag stories as a substitute for the fact that they can't be downvoted.

To my knowledge, links actually can be downvoted - but only after you yourself have >500 karma.

No, links can't be downvoted. Only comments can be. At the least, I am around 700 Karma, and I can't.

I'm at 7274 karma and I can't downvote links either. So either the karma limit is very high or it doesn't exist.

In any case, I don't think article downvotes would serve much use, articles nobody is interested in will naturally fall off due to lack of upvotes.

Isn't the problem that you lose some signal with the noise that way. You're not filtering out the chaff, you're skimming off the top level of grain.

If a submission is poorly titled then it will appear to be chaff [rubbish] when in fact it was grain [beneficial].

Articles cannot be downvoted at 500, or perhaps not at all.

This article by a prominent community member may help the GP though: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ

Links definitely cannot be downvoted, which presents an interesting asymmetry that incentivizes spamming with links and stories

I wonder if the constant reposting of articles would be stymied if the links could be downvoted.

Blog spam (adds nothing to original) and endless coverage of the same topic by everyone in the supposed "press" is still a big problem, and I'm not convinced there's much difference between the two.

There's the mostly unsolvable problem of "old-news versus news-to-me" at work which can skew voting and unfairly reward reposting or posting some new regurgitation (blog-spam/press-spam). The reason why the blog/press spam exists is to take advantage of incomplete knowledge, and sadly, it works. And worse, the better the echo-chamber works, the louder the noise gets.

As for giving an incentive to spam, it's a tough balancing act. Any new event is by definition, news, even if it is also promoting something. The litmus test is the voting, and HN as a whole still does fair job of up-voting interesting stories most of the time.

No, after 500 karma, you can down-vote comments, but not submissions.

I fairly sure there is a second karma threshold (or other gating mechanism) which gives you the ability to down-vote someone who you've replied to, or is replying to you. --I'm not sure how it works, and it's not public information, so asking for details is pointless.

In essence, the second level seems to mean you're trusted to use down-votes wisely.

Personally, I often up-vote people who reply to me with disagreements (even if they are too strongly worded). My reason is simple; I may never agree with them, but I DO appreciate the time they took to give me their point of view.

I fairly sure there is a second karma threshold (or other gating mechanism) which gives you the ability to down-vote someone who you've replied to, or is replying to you.

I'd like a reality check on this statement. What have other users observed? I think the routine behavior is that users with downvote privileges on comments can downvote comments other than those that are direct replies to their own comments and submissions. But I could be mistaken. What is the general case for most users who can downvote at all?

I agree with the OP that the best policy here is upvote what is good. Upvote early and often if you see good stuff.

A previous thread I saw suggested flagging blogspam ruthlessly, because that supports the community guideline "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've only seen it happen occasionally, but when it does happen, it's consistent for the occurrence, well, at least for a little while. It does not last for very long, so there's a time element involved, similar to how you get a "Can't make that vote" error if you try to up-vote something that is too old. It might be a bug caused by how caching is handled, or it might be intentional, either way, I've never actually tested to see if the odd down-vote button on a parent post actually works.

I agree with the OP that the best policy here is upvote what is good. Upvote early and often if you see good stuff.

It is an interesting approach. Not going into the details, brain is basically working this way - instead of trying to suppress neuronal activity for all inputs but the signal, it just amplifies the signal to have it above the sea of all other activity.

I would like to be able to upvote stories without the story going into the "saved stories" section of my user profile. I use this (perhaps obsolete) feature as a means to mark things I would like to reference later, and upvoting everything which was quality but which I don't want to reference again would defeat the purpose.

Having a separate "save" link which puts articles into the saved stories section would address this use case. Or perhaps one day I should go back through all my saved stories and bookmark the ones which are still relevant so that I can upvote all submissions which are good. Maybe a future version of HN will do away with "saved stories" as it's likely the intent of upvoting articles is meant to be the same as upvoting comments... and there's no "saved comments" section.

I've had 2 things that I thought weren't great but weren't terrible flagged and pushed to spot 301 in the last couple months. I don't know if they should have been or if it was excessive.

They were:

http://yourereallypretty.com http://tommy.authpad.com/this-is-why-you-ship

The spirit of Postel's Law applies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel#Postel.27s_Law

Upvote a lot.

Ignoring is usually better than downvoting.

Flag anything that's a blatant retail advertisement. "The best shoes at rockbottom prices!"

On that note - mods and supers, can I please have my flagging privileges back?

I've losy my flagging ability a long time ago too. Whats more concerning is the abuse of the flagging system to hide articles people that don't want others to seee. like articles not showing Apple or Google in a good light, or articles friendly to Microsoft... like the Surface review, for example.

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