Ask HN: Who is flagging legitimate stories?
I don't know if this is a trend necessarily, but in the last 2 days I've seen 2 stories that I found interest in being flagged.
Does anyone monitor this sort of thing? And if so does HN take away "flagging" privileges from those who abuse it?
4 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 18.7 ms ] threadI'm also flummoxed by some flags.
Like my election results submissions just a few minutes ago. Yes, it's not final, but projections are very accurate, and every major news outlet is reporting those.
Also a really bizarre medical story, which should fit HN's mission very well. People flagged it without comment. I thought, okay, it sounds outlandish, maybe people thought it was fake. So I submitted a bit later the peer-reviewed article in a reputable medical journal. Flagged without comments again.
The HN Guidelines say:
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
Election results are (1) politics and (2) covered on TV news.
But I'm puzzled about why your medical story got flagged. Could you post the link in a comment so we can see what it was?
The other article is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20016826 I'd blame also USA-centrism. A similar article about an election in USA would probably survive, and next year we will have an invasion of political articles. Probably it is a good idea to avoid posting all the election in all countries, but perhaps we can use a rule that says that we care about the countries that have nukes. (If it works in the UN, it can work in HN :).) (Hi from Argentina!)
This article is marked "[dead]", not "[flagged][dead]", so it wasn't killed by user flags. Either the domain is banned, or the article was killed by a moderator.
Since that article looks OK (it's a summary of scientific research), I've "vouched" it, and it's now alive again.