That's when I had my flag option taken away by mods, because I flagged all of these except for the top one.
It's an odd reaction that's honestly somewhat puzzling.
Though the mass flagging was of course unnecessary, it's not like mods didn't see that every single post was the same thing.
Sure, if said person is as influential to this community as Steve clearly was.
I don't understand why we're saddled with a few hundred people who conspired to kick this community in the nuts for a day and a night as some kind of self-flagellating tribute, but I don't consider them my peers. If I were pg for a day I'd stop counting votes from anyone who upvoted three dozen clones of the same wire story with almost no accompanying discussion.
I guess I always thought flagging was for inappropriate material, scams and obviously false things. Do most people use flagging as a downvote substitute for stories?
It'd have been really nice if the HN votes would have caused one or two generic stories and otherwise the really unique takes on it to rise to the top, but the HN voting system + crowd isn't capable of making such a selection. Indeed you'd need a downvote button, or at least some way of flagging what you consider to be near-duplicates. Reddit does this very well (both because of their system and their crowd), none of the programming/tech subreddits (that I saw) were dominated to exclusion of nearly any other news topic to the extent HN was, that day.
> I guess I always thought flagging was for inappropriate material, scams and obviously false things. Do most people use flagging as a downvote substitute for stories?
That's a bit of a false dichotomy, IMO. What is a downvote for? You downvote inappropriate material, scams, obviously false things, duplicates and low-quality content. Preferably you do not downvote things just for disagreeing with them (just like nobody upvotes things just for agreeing with them, right?).
So in this case, the guy considered all those stories about the same topic (with really minor variations in their "take" on it), to be near-duplicates and flagged them. Now, we don't know what happens to flagged posts really, so at this point anything could have happened: Maybe it flooded some sort of for-manual-review moderation queue which annoyed the mods, or maybe they did understand the reason for the flagging but decided that "NO. HN needs to mourn and the front page will be our shrine!" and bumped up some more Steve stories. The latter is not completely unlikely (even though it probably just were normal user votes), we all have seen stories that appeared or disappeared from the front page that couldn't have been caused by regular votes. So yes, the moderators could have er, moderated things a bit so we'd see one or two generic news stories from quality sources about Steve's death (rightly featuring at the very top), but bumped all other stories that did not offer a significantly different take on the news to the second page, in favour of more original content (which might have also been about Steve, if that really was the only thing people could write and think of that day, as long as it was something worth clicking).
With that criterion, we should also flag posts about Apple's patent lawsuits and appstore exclusion disputes :)
Nah, but I get your point. I'm really not interested in the average HNer's position on the global warming debate either. Mostly because the few people that actually are very knowledgeable on the topic (there must be a few) won't get the spotlight they deserve (again, criticism of HN's voting system, but it really sucks for cases like these).
And of course it's not really a typical "core" topic for HN. But actually quite many posts are not "typical" in the way you'd expect, as long as they provide ground for a fruitful and interesting discussion. Which global warming discussions indeed often do not.
It's the same scenario with finance and economics, in every corner of the internet, including here. It can be incredibly frustrating.