Comment by throwup238
5 months ago
I don’t know how many flags it takes to flag kill a whole article, but the threshold for comments is two or three flags. It doesn’t take a lot of people to kill an entire topic of discussion by flagging related articles, especially for users who only peruse the front page. Brigading on this site is almost trivial.
Dang’s anti-flagging mechanism is the human factor that balances that very blunt automated system. People don’t seem to vouch for articles as much as for comments.
[flagged]
It is the same feature. Maybe you haven't seen it because it is less visible.
Dead submissions have a vouch link on the new page. Dead comments require clicking on the comment timestamp before the vouch link becomes visible.
In either case you need showdead enabled on your profile, and to have met the karma threshold for vouch links to appear.
Once the comment disappears it is too late, no? How can an invisible comment be seen in order to be vouched or upvoted? I typically overlook grayed out or invisible comments unless I intentionally go looking for them.
2 replies →
> There should be an anti-downvoting/flagging facility
Like upvoting and vouching?
To be honest, I don’t think that comments are the problem. The community mostly does a good job of policing itself, especially once a thread gets enough visibility*. The problem is all the threads that get killed before they reach the front page (this post is a case in point).
* Although I will admit there are glaring blindspots you could drive a Panamax tanker through (especially political ones on the boundary between ideologies).