Comment by anigbrowl
5 months ago
If we end up with yet-another interchangeable flamewar about $BigTopic, that will only confirm that the flaggers were right'
No it won't. That would only be true if the flaggers were disinterested judges who never comment. You're projecting your desire for a good civil discussion onto them without considering the possibility that any of them could be flagging or commenting in bad faith, ie with a view to shaping the outcome of the discussion rather than optimizing the quality thereof.
Edit: oh wait, I think I understand you now. When I said "that will only confirm that the flaggers were right", I did not mean "that will only confirm that the flaggers all had the right motive". (Obviously not all of them do, as I've explained below.) Rather, I meant "that will only confirm that this submission wasn't a good one for HN, and therefore it was good that it got flagged (even though not every flag was rightly motivated)".
-- original comment --
> That would only be true if the flaggers were disinterested judges who never comment.
I don't follow this argument. Can you rephrase it?
Flagging flamewars is an appropriate use of flagging on HN. If this thread turns into the kind of flamewar we normally want to see flagged, that's evidence in favor of the users who made that call in the first place.
> the possibility that any of them could be flagging or commenting in bad faith
Yes. I've made this point many times, including in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092): there's usually two kinds of flaggers: users who want to suppress a story because they don't like it (e.g. politically), and users who feel like the story isn't in keeping with the site guidelines and are worried about protecting HN. I assume by "bad faith" you mean the first kind.
No, they are simply saying that someone who wanted these stories removed could both flag the story and engage in a flamewar. Then they wouldn't have predicted the situation, but created it.
Say some don't like stories about crypto currency, but tolerates them. So, stories about crypto currency appear and attract those interested in crypto currency. Say there are also stories about public projects, but those interested in crypto currency don't tolerate stories about public projects, so there are flamewars for those stories.
Your conclusion would then be that Hacker News is a good place for stories about crypto currency, but not for stories about public projects. Because stories about public projects creates flamewars and should therefor be removed.
When in reality those interested in public projects would be the ones wanting interesting discussions, while those interested in crypto currency would be acting against the spirit of the site.
As stories about public projects are removed eventually those interested in them would leave and stories about how public projects can't work would meet little resistance. Therefor not creating any flamewars and be good for HN. Yet, it would at best be the opposite of curiosity.
If you see threads that you think are examples of the dynamic you're describing, I'd appreciate specific links. Since I don't have specifics, I can only say that this doesn't match what we see in practice, or at least what I believe we see in practice.
For example, the comments that drive flamewars are mostly not produced by the accounts that have flagged the thread.
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While curious discussion is certainly a worthy aspiration for HN, it's inevitable that some some objects of curiosity will also be polarizing. The problem with the flagging mechanism and its lack of transparency is that a small group of people can stymie curious inquiry.
While I understand that you don't want to share flagging or voting preferences (though I don't consider this intimate data myself), it's hard for people have confidence in the flagging/vouching mechanism because there is no indicator of volume or frequency. One might argue that if there was it would be gamed, but the site is obviously being gamed as is. One indicator is the elevated volume of baity comments from throwaway accounts on some discussions.
My daily interface with Hacker News for the last decade has been https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994293, flagged, unflagged, and flagged again.)
There is clearly something unusual happening with flags. There is an obvious correlation between the post topic and likelihood of flags, even when the post's comments are reasonable.
I think this motivated flagging is preventing productive discussion on HN, and it's healthier in the long term for Hacker News to allow perhaps excessive discussions on these currently popular topics. Otherwise HN risks developing a reputation that it systematically suppresses discussions critical of the current administration. I think that reputation would linger for far longer than the temporary irritation some might feel about the currently popular topic.
> There is clearly something unusual happening with flags
I'd say what's unusual is the macro environment. This is the most politically intense moment in years. HN can't be immune from macro trends (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572 for recent posts on that). The current thread has been on the front page for 9 hours and counting, and has over 1000 comments and counting.
I know some people would prefer more, but that is always the case about any topic. Moreover, everyone has at least one topic they feel that way about. These are perennial conditions that come from the fundamentals of the site, not recent trends.
> it's healthier in the long term for Hacker News to allow perhaps excessive discussions on these currently popular topics
I have to disagree—I think the health of Hacker News depends on not doing this. Times like this are moments to reinforce HN's differentiation from other forums by insisting on its particular focus (i.e. that it's a forum for intellectual curiosity, not a current affairs site).If we lose users who get frustrated because they can't use HN primarily for political battle, that makes me sad, but the solution is not to use HN primarily for political battle.
> Otherwise HN risks developing a reputation that it systematically suppresses discussions critical of the current administration.
It's not true that HN does this, so anyone who believes it is jumping to a false conclusion. It bothers me a lot when people do that, but you wouldn't believe how often it happens, and how many kinds of false generalization people come up with—I could give you hundreds of examples. I've learned that it's a bad idea to worry too much about the false conclusions about HN that people jump to for reasons of their own. Not that I've stopped worrying too much about it—I still do, I've just learned that it's a bad idea.
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