Comment by hn1986
1 year ago
@dang, do you have any solutions for Musk related articles being flagged constantly? Clearly someone is trying to abuse the flag process. Does being flagged affect it getting on the frontpage or any effect?
1 year ago
@dang, do you have any solutions for Musk related articles being flagged constantly? Clearly someone is trying to abuse the flag process. Does being flagged affect it getting on the frontpage or any effect?
Why do you think that democratic flagging needs a solution?
> democratic flagging
how is it "democratic" when a few people can kill an article they don't agree with?
"democratic" would be upvotes & downvotes canceling each other out, which we already have.
Well, if you feel a flag is underserved you can vouch for the submission/comment. I think a vastly smaller number of vouches is needed to unflag something than the number of flags it took to flag it.
I know there's the downside of not being able to vouch for something until it got buried, but even so I think the end-result is reasonably democratic.
4 replies →
> "democratic" would be upvotes & downvotes canceling each other out, which we already have.
Submissions can't be downvoted; we don't already have that.
You can't unflag, can you? It is not like voting.
You can vouch for a thing, but only once a certain threshold of flags has been met. I've encountered the complaint that when this threshold is reached it's usually much too late to bring the submission back to the attention of the people, so the process is not exactly symmetric.
I flag most (not all) Musk-related articles because they're flamebait that isn't intellectually thought- or curiosity-provoking. This makes them unsuitable for HN, and therefore exactly what the flagging system is for.