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Ask HN: Why is flagging used as downvoting tolerated without consequence?

9 points by Tenoke ↗ HN
Threads are rejected daily because of flagging, and quite often that is done as a form of downvoting. Today's example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628386 but I see this happening all the time.

Sometimes things make sense to be flagged but surely it's not meant to be used just as a downvote? If it is can we just have a downvote button instead so those of us who respect the implied rules can use it to. And if it's not can we have a solution that punishes those who flag a thread which is later approved by a mod or something else?

8 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 24.4 ms ] thread
DarkWiiPlayer
Usually this happens when a post touches on some sensitive political topics; people then start flagging it for no reason, presumably because they just don't want to see the topic discussed.
dang
Such flags are for the most part quite in keeping with the site guidelines. If weren't for them, HN would be a political / current-affairs site. It's true that sometimes the flags go too far; in such cases we sometimes turn off the flags, if an article is particularly on-topic and/or capable of supporting a substantive discussion.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I'm not convinced that we can do much better than that. Turning off flags or weakening them would be weakening the immune system. We need the immune system. Yes, the system has failure modes; correcting for the failure modes of the system is what moderation exists for. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

DarkWiiPlayer
Yes, this doesn't at all disagree with my comment; browsing /new for a while, it is very obvious that most of the time, flagging is used to filter out spam and off-topic posts. However, it is certainly a thing that happens that on-topic posts, specially those covering topics where technology and politics intersect, often get down-voted if they touch on certain topics.

Mind you, I am specifically talking about posts that have already started spawning on-topic conversations in the comments. Overzealous and politically motivated flagging is definitely a thing that happens on HN, and the tool to combat it (showing dead posts and vouching for them) are much better hidden than the flag button.

kstenerud
Flagging is a way to keep flame wars off HN. The actual reasons why people flag a post aren't important; what's important is that without the option to flag, these same people would almost certainly escalate a flame war instead as their passions get the better of them.

This can of course be abused by "flagging rings", but it's a small price to pay for a mostly civil and on-topic front page.

aliasEli
I also sometimes flag submissions when they are essentially duplicates.

Is that acceptable behavior?

dang
Yes, but only if the previous submission got major attention. Otherwise the repost should go through; we want good stories to have multiple chances at getting attention. (This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

In the case where a previous submission did get major attention, it's helpful to post a link to that thread in the duplicate thread. It's nice to point your fellow users to where the big discussion is/was, and it's helpful to moderators because we might not know that the new post is a dupe.

dang
That post was hardly flagged at all. It did set off the flamewar detector. Probably rightly so as it was a classic sensational topic attracting a lot of low-quality comments.