Comment by slg
5 months ago
At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? Maybe this post isn't the one to do it, but there has been an onslaught of stories about the damage Musk and DOGE is doing to the US government including lots of tech specific stories. This is an important ongoing story that is relevant to the community here and every post about it shoots up the front page of HN only to disappear minutes later because of mass flagging.
> At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic?
I'm not sure "big" is the right word because we're not optimizing HN for topic importance - that would make for a current affairs site, which HN is not [1, 2]. But maybe that's hair-splitting in this case.
The short answer to your question is that when there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT), moderators turn off flags on stories that contain Significant New Information (SNI) that is interesting in HN's sense of the word (i.e. gratifying intellectual curiosity) and there is a fair chance of the article supporting a substantively different discussion than the ones which have already recently appeared on the same topic.
If you want more information, I'd start with my other post in this subthread (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
>moderators turn off flags on stories
I replied to your comment in that other chain, but just want to point something else out here specifically. There seems to be more than just flags that are dragging down this story. The top post on HN at the moment has 117 points and is 3 hours old. This post has 238 points and is 1 hour old and is currently number 8 on the front page. Number 7 is currently a post with 28 points posted 2 hours ago. There is clearly something else at work here besides flags and maybe disabling flags isn't enough to give these type of posts staying power on the front page of HN.
This is in the FAQ: "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
I turned off the flags and rolled back the clock on this submission so that it would be on the front page and have a chance at a thorough discussion. I didn't do that so much that it would go straight to #1, though, because that would not be in the interests of the site. These things need to be controlled burns.
7 replies →
Dang should have manually downranked it because anti-Musk politics are off-topic on HN.
2 replies →
I don't need a response to these questions, as they are HN internal/sensitive, but I wanted them to be at least thought about:
Do you track people who frequently flag stories and/or comments?
Do you collate those results against particular subjects? i.e. Any musk related story always gets flagged by $group
Do those groups/people always flag within X minutes of each other?
Do those groups/people match the general location of a random sampling of HN users, or do they differ in a statistically significant way?
dang has commented about this before, and IIRC the gist is that he has access to a ton of data about user activity on the site, and that in the vast majority of cases where it feels like a story/comment/opinion is being brigaded or otherwise maliciously targeted en masse, the data hasn't backed that up. The community is a large and varied, so inevitably whatever opinion you or I holds, there are a ton of people who also exist here who disagree.
One solution might be to limit how many new discussions a user can flag within a certain period.
I suspect the curation mentioned above[0] is crowd-sourced to a relatively small handful of “power” users with an outsized amount of flags in general. Probably not much of a solution to limit that.
0: Slightly confused; I’m referring to dang’s comment, which I thought was the GP comment.
I don't think it's very high, like 1500 upvotes or something, there is a large population of people who can flag.
Another idea is to make flags fractional, so the more upvotes you have the more weight your flags have. So those newly empowered get say 0.1 of a flag while more highly rated users get progressively closer to 1 flag.