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.
Hell-banning is for spammers and the mentally-ill. The way HN uses it is utterly despicable.
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 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.
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.
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.
I wonder exactly how common this behavior is? It's basically data for a "douchebag census."
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.
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.