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Comment by iamshs | Hacker News Reader

What? How is it being flagged? I think the community on here is balanced, and discussions are free of any vitriol.

Hacker News removes users' ability to flag articles if they abuse it. Just for shits and giggles I am going to perform an experiment: every time someone shrilly declares that MS articles are being mercilessness flagged by upset Google employees, I am going to flag the article as well.

My money is on my flagging ability not remaining intact for very long.

And how will that be a good experiment at all with one data point? Are you trying to find out the criteria of how they decide to remove the ability? I do not think it is limited to MS articles only.

Obviously it cannot be a good experiment. It is for shits and giggles.

I never bother to flag anymore, if I manage to have the ability removed by only flagging MS articles over the next few days then I am going to take that as a mild indication that all of the people whining about MS posts being flagged really just have persecution complexes and are not actually onto anything. If I don't have the ability removed, that suggests nothing at all.

The flagging ability is removed if you do a lot of flagging in a very short time, like the poster who didn't like all Steve Jobs posts on front page when he passed away and flagged them all and lost his flagging ability.

Microsoft related articles don't show up that frequently to cause that, especially because people don't even bother submitting them because 1. they don't get upvotes(because of HN's makeup) 2. If they happen to get upvotes they're flagged by overzealous Microsoft haters.

Anyway, if you think I am misguided, what's the alternative explanation of this and every other instance of such things? I am genuinely curious.

This article: http://i.imgur.com/FbkMiCI.png

Just a few more instances:

http://i.imgur.com/ADMcanz.png

http://i.imgur.com/Yg5kXJb.png

http://i.imgur.com/FbkMiCI.png

Why would someone want to flag a review of the Surface Pro review from Anandtech of all places? Note that a new Chromebook announcement was #1 for all day on that day.

Want to see more instances of such mod abuse?

A user complaining about this happening to Apple related stories as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4850128

Besides disagreeing that what you have shown is evidence of systematic underhanded flagging of MS related posts, I am at a complete loss as to how you figure that the mods are perpetrating some sort of abuse.

Also, whether or not you get your flagging privileges revoked is, among other factors, a function of how popular the things that you are flagging are. That is why you can flag spam on 'new' all day long to your heart's content but one hour of flagging a dozen or two "Steve Jobs died" posts will see you unable to flag almost immediately.

>Also, whether or not you get your flagging privileges revoked is, among other factors, a function of how popular the things that you are flagging are. That is why you can flag spam on 'new' all day long to your heart's content but one hour of flagging a dozen or two "Steve Jobs died" posts will see you unable to flag almost immediately.

Where did you gather this from, since you aren't banned from flagging?

Also, since you seem to be quite knowledgeable about HN's system, instead of just "disagreeing", could you enlighten us a few few ways other than flagging that all those posts in the screenshots are ranked lower than other older posts with less points?

Right now this story is like this:

101 points by CloudNine 4 hours ago | 46 comments

Yet it sits at #25, far below other posts with less points. What can cause that?

> Where did you gather this from, since you aren't banned from flagging?

In addition to this just being common knowledge, I had a HN account prior to this one that I retired when I decided that I wanted to have an account nominally connected to my external identity (it was not hellbanned). This account had it's flagging privileges revoked after I flagged a handful of Steve Jobs death stories.

> Also, since you seem to be quite knowledgeable about HN's system, instead of just "disagreeing", could you enlighten us a few few ways other than flagging that all those posts in the screenshots are ranked lower than other older posts with less points?

I have no inside knowledge into this, however it is my suspicion that vote velocity and comment section quality are factored into rank.

This would explain how highly controversial stories that undoubtedly had excessive flagging (I am thinking specifically of several of the "gender politics" themed stories we have had here in the past) have often managed to hang onto the top spot for unusual amounts of time. They had many high-quality comments.

Frankly the points and number of comments on those allegedly "flagged to death" Microsoft articles are pretty low. I can easily see small differences in voting velocity and comment quality accounting for the slightly lower rank on the page.

Is it possible that flagging is causing the phenomenon that you are seeing? Sure, it might be that. But I do not think that it is the only plausible explanation (or even the most plausible.)

If PG chimed in on this, there would be no reason to speculate.

Thanks for the post, but have to disgree on some points. the differences aren't small, they're quite big when you realize that ranking makes a huge difference to how many people see it and how many more new votes it gets, especially if it goes off the front page.

Adding more data for perusal. HN rankings charts show abnormal behavior too, because all the complaining led to more upvotes or it would've fallen off the front page.

http://hnrankings.info/5715168/

http://hnrankings.info/5715889/

Will post more screenshots of downranked submissions tomorrow, maybe we can figure out exactly what's happening.

I don't know -- at the time of this reply 12/30 top links were Google related. Google does some interesting stuff but the Tech world isn't THAT small.

Non-conspiratorial explanation: Google I/O was today.

Ah that explains it. I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories in general, but it definitely was suspicious at first =)

I can understand that. Any other day I would find it suspicious as well.

Non-non-conspiratorial explanation: Google fans are flagging other stories like this on so that Google I/O get the maximum exposure. :)

Edit: I thought the smiley at the end would show I was joking?

So now it isn't just Microsoft posts that are getting flagged, but everything not Google? Give me a break, that will absolutely get your flagging privileges revoked, and quickly.

Does it really surprise you that Google is receiving large amounts of exposure today? Really?

Edit: Apologies, I assumed your intentions poorly.

This is a regular occurrence on Microsoft related stories which don't show it in a bad light and anti-Google stories.

See #26 on the front page:

26.Where Is .Net Headed? (odetocode.com)

5 points by wubbfindel 44 minutes ago | 1 comment

How come that story is on the front page but this one with triple the points and submitted almost at the exact same time isn't?

35. Microsoft responds to YouTube demands, 'more than happy' to include ads (theverge.com)

14 points by CloudNine 48 minutes ago | 9 comments

Even benign Surface Pro reviews are flagged by the high-karma Gods, can't have them hurting Chromebook sales.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4849814

Ah. I get it. I get it. Google data centre post has less points than this one, but is on the main page and so is the .net one, which i guess is anti-MS one. Thank you for the explanation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com