Comment by glenstein
1 month ago
I also would appreciate knowing if the mods see this. I'm worried that flagging is possibly automated and vulnerable to campaigning.
1 month ago
I also would appreciate knowing if the mods see this. I'm worried that flagging is possibly automated and vulnerable to campaigning.
We eventually saw it, but only randomly.
In case you didn't see them yet, here are some of my other comments in this thread:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Specifically, when I looked through who had flagged the current post, I saw the usual coalition between users who appear to be consistently flagging for political reasons, and other users who have quite different flagging patterns than that. In any case, virtually all of the accounts that flagged the thread were established HN users.
Sometimes when people bring this concern up, I go through and make a list of other stories that the same accounts had flagged, to illustrate the point that their flags are not exclusively targeting one specific topic or vector. I've done that here in a collapsed reply, if anyone wants to take a look.
I hope this explanation helps - your posts in this thread seemed to me to be in good faith so I wanted to respond in kind. If you still have a question that my comments and links to past explanations haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Here are some stories that flaggers of this submission also flagged. I have no idea why, except for the handful of obvious spam, but it illustrates the point I made in the parent comment.
The rise and fall of peer review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44730021 - July 2025 (42 comments)
As always, thanks for the transparency.
It seems that people, even "established HN users" will flag literally anything. Do you feel that there is any remaining article quality signal that can be obtained from the current flagging mechanism?
3 replies →