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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

I have complained about this to moderators before. There are certain topics that are almost off limits on HN not due to the rules, but due to the heavy flagging they always receive. Articles by, about, and for women are one common example. These articles being flagged results in this community being pulled further into a dangerous realm of misogyny that already exist in some pockets of the tech world.

EDIT: Another example of semi-banned topics is criticism of HN. This post was number 1 on the front page a few minutes ago. It is already down to 11 with several older posts with fewer points higher up on the front page.

EDIT 2: And now this post is seemingly flagged killed. From number 1 to disappeared in roughly 10 minutes.

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I'm not a mod and I don't have any inside track, but I've been around a while. I suspect that this item has fallen not because of flags, but because it's got 80 comments and only 75 votes. There is a mechanism as a proxy to detect flame wars, and is not necessarily because of flagging.

If you think this has been sunk inappropriately then email the mods. They are quite open to getting honest, constructive comments and suggestions. If you think this item and this discussion is of value to the community, let them know and they might agree and remove the flame-war penalty.

I have scrolled through several pages and this post is no longer in the top 200 on HN. I have never seen the flame-war penalty hit anything close to that hard that quickly. I am pretty sure this is from user flagging.

It may be. I've also now read through most of this thread and I can say categorically that for me, this thread is now mostly full of dross, and I'd be tempted to flag it as being of negative value to HN.

I haven't, but I can see why others would. Like it or hate it, the purpose of the voting system is to provide a direction for the content. You may disagree, but it's like elections - you get what "the community" deems valuable or relevant.

There's a lot of stuff I post that sinks without trace, and other things that get downvoted into obvlivion even though I personally think they are of positive value.

The community decides - you have to accept that.

I am not suggesting we remove the ability to downvote or flag. I still want the community to decide most of these things. I simply want more accountability for these actions so they aren't used for petty reasons. You would be free to flag this post for causing a comment section full of garbage. You would just have to say that rather than flagging and moving on.

That would lead to a ton of comments saying why they had flagged or downvoted things. Such comments tend to be of low quality and (if people could reply) would lead to endless bickering. IMO it's much better for signal/noise ratio not to go there.

I once spoke to the creator of a much larger forum than HN, who told me the biggest mistake they made was to add a meta facility to the site.

I think the idea is that when you flag or downvote you have to provide a comment on the action, and that comment is then displayed when someone asks for a list of downvotes and/or flags. Those comments are not part of the regular comment system, and one can't reply to them.

It's what happens on Lobsters, but whether or not it makes a difference is hard to say. The traffic is small enough that I doubt the effect is properly measurable.

Right, but however you expose that information, aren't you just providing nucleation sites for meta-debates? This is a site that practically begs users to generate opinions about everything; you can't even pick the background color for your blog post without potentially sparking a 10-comment subthread about it. Off-topic meta arguments are arguably the biggest problem comment threads on HN have.

Agreed.

I respect your position but I don't agree with your conclusions:

> That would lead to a ton of comments saying why they had flagged or downvoted things. Such comments tend to be of low quality

It's only low quality if the reasons for down voting are low quality and since the purpose of forced replies is to weed out low quality moderation, I think the ends justify the means.

> and (if people could reply) would lead to endless bickering.

People already bicker about the moderation. Constantly. What I'd hope to see it fewer people impulsively moderating posts. Which might have the ironic effect of reducing some of the complaints.

Obviously those who have a tendency to bicker will likely continue to do so but that will be little change to what they're already doing now.

> I once spoke to the creator of a much larger forum than HN, who told me the biggest mistake they made was to add a meta facility to the site.

That may also turn out to be true for HN but equally it may not. Every forum and community is different so what works in one place might not work in another -- and visa versa. As it is, the quality of comments have and peer moderation has already been on a downwards trajectory for a few years now so it's probably worth trying some new ideas to see if it does shake the less confident yet still experienced engineers back into contributing thoughtful posts.

> you have to accept that

Except for eating, drinking and breathing, that's almost never absolutely true. All human contrivances are malleable.

Go for it. Good luck.

It was both, but we turned off the flamewar detector.

... and on Lobsters you would neither need to speculate what happened nor kneel in front of the mods to fix it, because moderation actions are publicly logged¹. :-)

¹ https://lobste.rs/moderations

HN has hosted countless threads about gender issues and articles by, about, and for women. Here is one from two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22128385. Some get flagged; sometimes we turn off the flags, especially when the article contains substantive information and isn't primarily a sensational piece.

This is by no means an under-represented topic on this site in relative terms. You may feel that it's under-represented in absolute terms, but that's true of every important topic, because front page space is the scarcest resource HN has.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Isn't the fact that you regularly have to turn off the flags on these articles a sign that these articles get unnecessarily flagged? And even when you do unflag articles, sometimes it is just too late to rescue. For example, this article was flagged. You unflagged it, but by now it is page 8 instead of number 1 on the front page like it was when I saw it.

EDIT: This comment received two downvotes within 3 minutes of me posting. It is a comment buried half way down the comment section on a post that is 8 pages deep on HN. That type of immediate reaction seems strange and as a user it would be helpful to know whether something I said is unfit for this community or if there is some other reason for that reaction. Requiring users explain themselves for this behavior provides some immediate value for me on this comment.

It's a sign that moderation mechanisms and user mechanisms sometimes produce different outcomes, which is true of every aspect of HN, and is why moderation is necessary in the first place. I wouldn't draw specific conclusions about gender issues from that. Gender is a well-represented topic on HN, and has been for years. Some people feel it should be more so, some less so; that is also the case for every prominent topic, and doubly so for divisive ones.

We didn't unflag this article. We turned off the software penalty called the flamewar detector.

There's nothing odd about your comment being downvoted. Other users are still reading this thread just like we are. As for why they downvoted, perhaps they felt you were prosecuting the point in a repetitive way, or that the discussion has gotten too meta. Those things attract downvotes because they quickly get uninteresting.

You really aren't going to admit that there is any abuse of the flagging system? Either way, at one point this article said [Flagged] in front of it and now it doesn't. Can articles reach that flagged state from purely the flame war detector?

I disagree about the gender thing and I'm not the only person to mention that specifically in this comment thread, but I recognize arguing that point isn't going to get us anywhere.

My point in that edit was that it is strange to see immediate and strong reaction on a comment that is buried so deeply. There are different expectations for a comment here compared to something on the front page in which many users are likely to see it as soon as it is posted. I have mentioned this to you before, but I think constructive feedback is important if you want people to actually become better community members here. Both you and I are left wondering why my comment received a negative response and I therefore have no direction on how to improve my comments.

Did my other comment here legitimately get flagged? I am supremely confused by that. I guess you could read that first sentence as rude, but that hardly seems flagging worthy. I also have no idea if that is even the reason it was flagged because flagging requires no justification on HN.

Dang, do you see how that flagged comment reinforces my point?

I'm afraid I don't. Sure there's abuse of the flagging system; there's abuse of everything. But HN's system as a whole (consisting of community, software, and moderation) has countervailing mechanisms for that and other abuses. The example you raised, of threads about women and gender issues, shows this very much, since those not only do not "always get flagged" as you claimed, but just the opposite: it is one of the more prominent topics on HN, as I've explained.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what your point is, other than to complain about downvotes and flags, which is a discussion that gets increasingly repetitive and tedious, which is no doubt why the posts attracted further downvotes and flags.

For sure it sucks to see one's comments downvoted or flagged. The best response to this is to reflect on what in your comment might have led to that. Usually it's not so hard to see this if you're willing to look objectively. If you do see something, that's good learning for next time. If you don't, chalk it up to the quirks of other users and move on—it's priced in for everybody, and focusing on it further (e.g. by demanding reasons) is a poor use of energy and an especially poor direction for further discussion.

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