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Comment by Permit | Hacker News Reader

We have no way to tell if they're being flagged by users or setting off the automated system for detecting flamewars.

One of the problems with the topic is that essentially every Hacker News reader feels as though they're qualified to comment on the topic. This translates into massive nested threads that blow up with people arguing the same points.

I'm not convinced that discussion of these issues on Hacker News does anything to push the ball forward. I have yet to meet the person who changed their position on the subject due to an internet argument.

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About a year ago, a friend wrote a good post about diversity in hackathons which was submitted to HN and hit #2 quickly, then dropped down to the second page in an instant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495950

Not many people commented on it. I believe the flame-war detector only takes significant effect when # comments > # points, which is a pretty good heuristic for a flame war that has gone out of control.

Haha it's funny that you've cited that post as I'm complaining that it's getting flagged in the comments... I guess the point is that HN is a black box to us regular users and it's tough to speculate on how and why threads move as they do.

For what it's worth at this late date, that post set off the voting ring detector. No users flagged it and no moderator moderated it.

That clarifies that mystery :P. Thanks!

Any chance of getting some transparency of what automated or manual processes have affected a particular story (ie, on the story comment page itself), possibly delayed by some period to prevent bad actors from realising their voting rings or whatever were discovered?

> We have no way to tell if they're being flagged by users or setting off the automated system for detecting flamewars.

This is the fundamental problem. No matter how a story gets made invisible, once it gets in that state nobody knows how it got there and whether or not it was justified. Not to mention that no matter how those stories vanish, HN (by community or systems) is not facilitating discussion on diversity, sexism, racism, etc. in tech.

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