Comment by fakedang
1 year ago
There ought to be a time-based flagging limit, so that people don't abuse the system. I've already raised this earlier.
If Company A makes a killer product announcement, rival Company B could simply get its employees to spam down votes on and flag that post. Company A gets less visibility, and dang won't be able to come on time to stop it.
This is an easily plausible hypothetical, which may already be happening.
Flagging requires high HN karma. You get that by being a positive member of the community. Most such people, if a company even has one, would find it against their personal ethics to do that. And dang can see the karma ratio and unflag any actually worthwhile announcements.
I think as people have become more and more aware that flag negatively weights items for rankings, and isn't just a "hey have the mods look at this rule breaking thing", more people have started using it as a downvote button. It was my understanding that HN originally didn't have a downvote feature to avoid the kind of issues that the flag usage is now causing.
Even the highest karma users can lose their flagging privileges, temporarily or perhaps even permanently, if they do it enough times within a time window or if abuse is detected. So from what I understand that issue should be taken care of.