HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is it OK to vouch for many posts?

14 points by yegor256a ↗ HN
I turned the "showdead" feature ON and now I see many posts with the [dead] marker. Some of them are interesting and I'm tempted to click "vouch" on some of them. If I do this too often, won't it hurt the reputation of my account somehow? I mean, am I allowed/supposed to do this frequently or this "vouching" feature is for emergency only?

9 comments

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abhisuri97
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512 Maybe that will answer your question. But just exercise common judgment, think of a possible reason as to why a particular thing was flagged [dead] to begin with, and then determine if it's unfair.
yegor256a
I'm trying to understand the intent of this feature. Is it an invitation to help HN to decide who is posting good content and who is not, and we are supposed to vouch frequently. Or, it is only for some corner cases and we should not touch it too often.
abhisuri97
So its basically community moderation and you should "Only rescue civil, substantive contributions to the site". In a sense, I think its something you only do as a special-type thing, but one vouch on a post won't rescue it (there need to be multiple vouches if I understand it correctly)...so vouch if you want to, but make sure you're doing it for the right reasons.
jnbiche
> but one vouch on a post won't rescue it

I've been able to consistently save dead comments with a single vouch, so I presume it only takes one, at least for some level of HN user.

yegor256a
Yes, same here. Just one "vouch" rescues a post.
mindcrime
Same.

FWIW, I've always treated the "vouch" feature as something to be used fairly infrequently, for somewhat exceptional cases. I don't know if that's actually the intent or not, but it "feels" like the kind of thing one shouldn't be doing all the time. shrug

quickthrower2
I usually have a higher bar for vouching. It has to be more than something that wouldn’t be flagged if that makes sense. Mainly because I don’t what my rep to get a hit. Something I think is ok might be a bad comment in the quantum HN mind.
SamReidHughes
You could always email the webmasters (see the contact link at the bottom of the page) and ask them if your vouching usage fits the intended use of the feature.
riffic
Vouch early and vouch often.