Comment by dang
1 year ago
> I've long felt that adding a required "reason" field when flagging would be useful.
I've resisted that on the grounds of not wanting to make things too bureaucratic, but I can feel myself tipping slightly on the question for a somewhat odd reason: there are too many mistaken/accidental flags, especially on mobile, so we probably need a confirmation screen to allow people to say "oops, cancel". If one adds that, it's probably fine to ask for a reason too.
Re the other questions: flags, above a certain threshold, act as downweights on the story. Above another (higher) threshold, the [flagged] marker appears. Above another (still higher) threshold, the story will also be killed, in which case it will show up as [flagged][dead] and closed to new comments. However, if a thread has already gotten a lot of comments, the software won't kill it. In addition, moderators sometimes put [flagged] on a post—but this is rare for stories; we do it more often on comments that are breaking the site guidelines.
So that makes 3 different ways for a story to end up [flagged] but not [dead]. The one you postulated (a story is [flagged][dead] and then we manually unkill it, so it becomes [flagged] but not [dead]) is technically possible and I can't say it never happens, but it's definitely not standard practice and would be a weird edge case if it did happen.
Have I answered your questions?
p.s. various past explanations can be found at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Edit: I forgot about another case. If a post is [flagged][dead] and then enough users vouch for it, it will stop being [dead] but will still be [flagged].
All great context, thanks for weighing in here with so many details!
Anecdotally I can say that I've accidentally flagged a couple articles on mobile, the same goes for accidentally downvoting though its easy enough to notice that and fix it with the upvote I intended.
My reason for asking initially was mostly out of curiosity. I wasn't actually aware that there was a [dead] state separate from [flagged]. The few threads I've commented on and were later flagged just always make me wonder what the flag was for.
Its a larger ask of users with regards to moderation, but I could see it being really interesting to test out linking flags to comments. I.e. a user has to enter a comment when flagging a thread, potentially it is shown without the username visible for privacy.
Just my two cents though, thanks for following up here!
Thanks, that helps to clarify. I wasn't aware of the progression of flags: from downweighted, to showing [flagged], to [flagged][dead]. I also wasn't aware that stories with lots of comments were essentially "immune" to being killed. Is it correct that the number of comments is what saved this story from being killed?
Accidental flags seem like another good reason to add a "reason" field. I'm not sure what interface makes sense, but I do think it would be useful to know if the flagging was done because the link was broken, or because the title is bad, or something else that could be easily fixed. Personally, I'd be more likely to flag dupes if there was a way to signify why I was flagging them.
Your answer also makes me wonder if all [flagged] stories should have a "vouch" link visible. I view flagging and vouching as opposites. It seems suboptimal and oddly asymmetrical that a story can be permanently penalized by flagging without allowing other users to cancel out those flags. The vouch link seems like a wonderfully democratic solution apart from this.
Alternatively, if the goal of showing [flagged] is to signify that a story is contentious, I wonder if [flagged][dead] stories that are revived by vouching should still keep their [flagged] tag even if the penalty is removed. Consider a story like this one but with fewer comments. If it's [dead], one can vouch for it and restore it fully; but if it's just [flagged], it's penalized forever.
I noticed that there is nothing in the FAQ about vouching, so I did a search and found this.
I think it would be useful to know if there are some accounts or groups which frequently flag things. You could potentially expose this data without disclosing their names. Are there in fact people acting as censors?
Vouching is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch
Re who flags what: the basic pattern seems pretty consistent and I've described it a number of times over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... The short version is that there are some people who flag specific topics but usually those flags alone aren't enough to make the difference.
I beg your pardon. I did do a Find on the FAQ but somehow didn't get it.