Comment Flagging on HN as of Late

I have personally recently seen things a number of things flagged I really would have liked to have seen discussed. It's definitely taken seen an uptick recently.

+1 Same feelings, outlook and perceived quality of discourse exactly.

Couldn't agree more with the proposed countermeasures. Kudos for stepping up and proposing them.

Has this site had any UX/UI updates in years? I've always assumed assumed it's "done" and we just have to deal with what it is. I come here less and less because of how feature-free and bad the UX is. Everything is a click to another page, then click back to what you were doing. Why do I need to go to another page to favorite an article? It causes me to hardly use the feature because it's such an interruption.

I largely agree. I wonder whether people should have to pay (in points?) to comment, this would demotivate people who have just have nothing of value to contribute and those who are simply trying to gain points because it would be an investment. Is that a bad idea?

Agreed.

To add to that: not all up/downvotes are equal.

Sometimes I upvote something that I find very informative and interesting and sometimes because I mildly like it.

I personally only downvote stuff I find very hostile and/or low effort “noise”. It seems that most people do it this way. Except in cultural discussions (includes tech culture).

On a similar thread a few months ago someone commented that another discussion forum they use requires one of a handful of pre-defined reasons for a vote (both up- and downvotes). It's a simple dropdown so it doesn't add a lot of friction to voting. Different reasons have different impacts on the commenter's reputation score (for example "hate speech" has a greater penalty than "low quality" and stuff like that). I can't recall what the site was called though.

Does flagging happen automatically (without moderation)? That is, if N users flag a post, does it get flagged? Or does it tell dang that N users have flagged it, and he makes a decision?

I myself flag posts for hostility to other users, or for blatant shilling (political or commercial). I don't think I do so for much beside those.

Perhaps more nuance is called for, by having a sliding scale of rating -1 <---> +1

Who has the ability to flag comments, like is it one of those unlockable features when you hit X karma? I see that I can flag posts, but I've never seen the flag comment button.

There's a pandemic on. The entire world has cabin fever and is cranky as all hell.

This is not a good time to make sweeping policy changes in reaction to people being cranky and mildly ill-behaved in their voting patterns.

Trying to make systemic changes to address this is how the world becomes more draconian. It doesn't become more civilized when you double down on "All y'all assholes better behave, damn it."

During crisis times in my life, when the kids were spazzing, my answer was usually "Go to bed and get some sleep. You're tired and cranky and we can discuss this tomorrow after you've slept."

Being more hard-line controlling instead of kind and compassionate and wise is the usual answer in situations like this. It's also the wrong answer and one of the reasons we've inherited so much crap from the past.

More politics, more flagging. HN is at times overwhelmingly political recently, and I'm afraid this will not get better until the election.

FWIW, I haven't noticed a significant change in flagging or downvoting comments, for the conversations I follow. However, there does seem to be a an uptick in flagging posts.

> I would like to see a flag require a submitted textual reason

Thought experiment: how could that be abused? And what would we do about that?

> some input of some kind to raise the bar needed to damage someone.

"Damage someone?" You're taking this too seriously.