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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I've come to the conclusion that HN voting/ranking is like Google search engine ranking: you're not supposed to know how it works. If you did, people would game the system.

So it's a magic act. As a programmer, this frustrates me terribly. I just emailed dang yesterday because I had submitted something that shot up, got a lot of attention, then died just as suddenly. Hell, I didn't know, I thought the system was broken or something. Turns out I was flagged.

The upvote thing you mention is especially annoying. You click the little button, you're expecting something to happen. That's the nature of clicking little buttons on computer interfaces.

Hell-banning also drives me nuts, for similar reasons. Computers should serve us, not the other way around. [insert long discussion here about having to manage a site with a zillion users, and how it's easy for me to rant about this but I should walk a mile in dang's shoes, etc.]

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Hell-banning also drives me nuts, for similar reasons.

Hell-banning is for spammers and the mentally-ill. The way HN uses it is utterly despicable.

Flagging was supposed to be for articles that were so bad they didn't belong on the site, not just articles you didn't like.

But not anymore. If I had to bet, I'd say folks are using flagging as a tool to both get payback and game the rankings.

I'm pretty sure that I've flagged less than 5 articles that were on the front page (as opposed to /new) within the last 4 years. I would imagine that some people are using flagging to make up for the absence of a downvote button for submissions, though.

I am absolutely certain than they are. Some have even admitted it in discussions - they use it to mark articles that they think aren't quite right for HN or are likely to result in worthless discussion. Tptacek explained that that was why he flagged posts.

I am of the camp that flagging should only be used to mark "this is really inappropriate/terrible content that should be taken off the site immediately", not "this doesn't fit my opinion of what should belong on HN".

Flags are basically super-powered downvotes. A couple of flags can demolish the ranking of a post with 40 upvotes in 40 minutes.

If you're gonna allow that, might as well just have downvotes and be transparent.

Transparency would be nice. If tptacek downvoted/flagged anything I submitted, yet others loved them, I might wait until he was offline until I posted something. (apologies for using him as an example!)

I flag things where I can't imagine anything but pointless bickering going on. If I want to comment, and what I want to say sounds to me like "you asshat!" then I do a double-check to make sure the content belongs here. If I click through to comments and the thread is basically full of people saying "I believe X, and those that don't are obviously asshats" then I know it needs a flag.

Flagging isn't that I don't like it. It's that it hurts the site. I've flagged highly emotional pieces I agreed with. To me it's the effect on the site that should trigger a flag, not whether I like it or not. I already have voting for that.

See, that I would leave to the moderators, and to the flame war detector, rather than applying my personal opinion of "I don't like this discussion" and thereby downvoting a story by 10 points.

'flagging as downvoting' has been going on for a very long time, and this is logical because they have the exact same effect, in fact, a flag counts for roughly 10 downvotes by my estimates.

If a flag was unjust the flagger should get penalized, or alternatively a flag should simply cost you 10 points. That way it might be used sparingly and for its intended purpose.

flagging as downvoting' has been going on for a very long time, and this is logical because they have the exact same effect, in fact, a flag counts for roughly 10 downvotes by my estimates.

I wonder exactly how common this behavior is? It's basically data for a "douchebag census."

Yeah, it's basically a royal F-U from some bozo. It doesn't fit the word "flagging", at least not in any sense that I understand it.

Perhaps Thomas would descend from his stratospheric karma then, since my understanding is he flags very liberally.

It has been going on a long time.

But, say you had a new site. If you got flagged a few times, doesn't HN auto-ban the site? As opposed to just getting down-voted, where you could submit more articles?

I feel like I need a playbook just to keep track of all the various threads and conversations around how HN works.

Perhaps you causality arrow is reversed. I think the assertion that flagging is for articles that a flagger believes should not be on the site (which might correlate strongly with articles the flagger doesn't like).

As the population of the site grows and evolves different people "like" or "dislike" different things. I've argued in the past for more of a 'compass rose' rather than an upvote/downvote. Something where left and right arrows meant "more like this (right)" or "less like this (left)" and a center dot for "on target".

That would allow people to vote in two dimensions, site appropriateness and interest. Doing data analysis on the votes/voters could also provide local nexii of interests such that if you wanted to, one could create a 'front page' that would be ranked according to your nexus rather than a general ranking.

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