Ask HN: Flagging front page stories | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Flagging front page stories

10 pointsnkurz10 comments

After consideration, I just flagged several stories that are currently on the front page:

  I Spent A Month Living In A Romanian Sexcam Studio
  http://m.vice.com/read/bucharest-webcam-studios-america-outsourcing-sex-trade

  Invisible Child: Dasani’s Homeless Life
  http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/invisible-child/

  Governments admit to faking terrorism: a list
  http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/12/governments-admit-they-carry-out-false-flag-terror/

They are excellent articles, and I feel bad about doing so. I'm sure the submitters posted them in good faith because they enjoyed them and wanted to share them with others. I read them, and enjoyed them too. By and large, the comments are high quality: better than vast majority of discussion on the mainstream internet.

But that's the problem: I'm scared that if HN continues moving to becoming a discussion site for mainstream news, that it will be impossible to avoid a great slide in quality of stories and commentary. Historically the odds are really against it.

Maybe that's OK, maybe things have to evolve. If it happens, certainly there will be other sites that pop up to replace it, and they too will have their period of quality conversation before they too evolve. Still, it seems like an unnecessary loss.

Am I wrong to be worried? Is there a better solution than flagging high-quality popular articles that don't have a hacker or start-up focus?

Why flag a non-offensive, non-spam article? That is what the point/vote system is for. If more people in the hackernews community want to read interesting non-technical, non-startup related articles then they are "hacker news", or at least "news interesting to hackers".

The flagging system is to weed out spam, advertisements, offensive/porn, etc. This is flagging abuse IMHO.

Why flag a non-offensive, non-spam article?

Because that's the only way to fix the problem.

Bad stories like the ones mentioned by the OP are really popular with a demographic that we don't want here. There are lots of people who love nothing more than to argue about things that make them angry, and if they see something that makes them angry, they'll immediately vote it up so that they can argue about it.

But we don't want this to be a community of angry people arguing with one another. To avoid that, we need mechanisms to actively discourage it.

Simply standing by and hoping that more nerds will upvote Haskell tutorials won't help if the room is rapidly filling up with veteran YouTube commenters.

Keep in mind you only get a certain number of flags. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6803917

It's more of a too-many-flags-in-a-certain-time-period.

Source: Am flagbanned, likely after giving 10 flags in 1 day. (yes, there's that much blogspam on HN nowadays unfortunately)

I do the same. I haven't seen stats but my hunch is that "accounts older than 3 years" flag those stories much more frequently than "accounts created in the past 3 years". The former is becoming smaller and thus, about two years ago, the submission/popularity of "reddit-style" articles. I blame Jeff Atwood for constantly posting about how great HN was on his blog years ago. He started it haha.

I flagged all those stories too and many others each day that are not at all tech or business related.

Just flagged: "Uruguay's president José Mujica: no palace, no motorcade, no frills".

It's not flagging abuse IMO, as these stories are clearly off-topic and shouldn't be on HN.

At what karma level, currently, is may feed flagging allowed, just to be curious.

"They are excellent articles, and I feel bad about doing so."

Then you're part of the problem! The attitude is, if it doesn't fit the "Hacker News" relevancy stereotype then flag away. Have you not wondered or even humbled yourself to consider that perhaps your own view is more short-sighted than the posters? I guess flagging in general takes an error ratio into account but it's my experience that it's far too swift here on HN, meaning more weight is given to the flaggers than the posters.

Honestly though, thank-you for asking and posting your actions here for discussion! That, in my opinion, is a lot better than the countless silent flaggers everywhere flags exist.

I think that each of us should ask ourselves the question, "Is this topic good for HN" more often.

The commentary on the linked threads is, arguably, low quality discussion, and tends to bring out the worst in us -- self-included. Any topic that might encourage commentary like "Democrats shouldn't be allowed to vote" or "Republicans are racists" should be looked at with skepticism, as even the best meaning of us is subject to responding fueled by emotion.

There are times when political discussions on HN are extremely relevant to the HN community. There are times when they are not. Each of us imposes different value judgements as to which are which, but if we each choose to upvote them slightly less, and flag them more aggressively where we find them inappropriate, then perhaps we could tip the scales in favor of less of them appearing on HN, which I think is the preferable alternative to more.

Have you not wondered or even humbled yourself to consider that perhaps your own view is more short-sighted than the posters?

Yes, I question myself often. The purpose of this post was to get some outside perspective, and start a discussion of how best to keep this a site for high quality discussion. And I don't blame the posters: I'm sure I've posted things that others find off-topic.

On the flip-side, presuming you like HN as it is, I'd ask whether you've considered that its current state is not the result a "natural evolution", rather the conscious curation of numerous previous parties. That is, if we are where we are due to frequent flagging, what are the consequences of stopping?

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