Ask HN: Aren't we flagging too many submissions?

8 days ago

I noticed this article I submitted a couple minutes ago, about an internal reorganization at Blue Origin [0], was flagged a couple minutes after posting.

Do we collectively think we are going to degenerate into flame wars so easily even this relatively harmless piece about one of SpaceX's competitors is deemed too risky?

I'm all in favor of flagging and hiding articles that devolve into shouting matches and ad-hominem attacks, but proactively doing so before the first comment appears seems to be a bit excessive.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/citing-too-much-bureaucracy-blue-origin-to-cut-10-percent-of-its-workforce/

11 comments

rbanffy

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ChrisArchitect  8 days ago

Or you could just upvote one of the 4-5 other posts on it already.

  • duxup  8 days ago

    Those will end up flagged eventually too. A lot of the "dupe" links lead to a flagged thread.

    Flagging on HN now appears to be "I don't like this news". Granted on every site that eventually is that.

    • ChrisArchitect  8 days ago

      Those other ones, doge related etc, are a different issue. This Blue Origin one is .. just news. And there's a number of posts. Stuff moves fast around here.

      1 reply →

pmdulaney  8 days ago

I personally don't see the benefit of either down voting or flagging. Flagging in particular, more often than not, seems to denote: "This post is not sufficiently ingratiating to my political convictions".

  • duxup  8 days ago

    Yeah it SEEMS like a minority of flags can over power votes and comments. Meaning the "I don't want people to talk about that" type "vote" is over represented. That's not something that should be that strong.

    IMO flags should be reserved for spam, bad data, fundamentally untruthful content, but that's clearly not how they're being used.

silexia  8 days ago

Huge numbers of federal employee bureaucrats afraid for their jobs are now spamming HN (and every other site) with desperate attempts to paint Elon Musk and his efforts to shrink the federal government in a negative light.

  • ImPostingOnHN  7 days ago

    I doubt it

    most people already find it difficult to view a literal seig-heiling nazi in anything other than a negative light, even if he made the trains run on time or whatever