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Ask PG: Please fix flagging.

13 points by kyro ↗ HN
It seems as if all it takes is a few flags to kick a post right off the front page -- posts that have had a reasonable number of upvotes and discussion. I've been noticing this for a while, but what prompted me to make this post is that it seems as if two YC company launch posts were flagged and sent right to the bottom of the front page. So it's not really in your best interest, or of others that have legitimate content.

6 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 28.2 ms ] thread
6thSigma
Flagging does seem very powerful and I've seen quite a few 'Show HN' and similar posts flagged off of the front page for seemingly no reason.

I assume bitter/jealous people are doing the flagging but who knows.

enraged_camel
This is probably true. At least when it comes to articles about fitness, when they fall off the front page I always assume that some overweight guy got annoyed and flagged it.
enraged_camel
I was going to make a new post about it and saw yours. Yes, I agree that it's a TREMENDOUS annoyance. We were just having a great discussion in the student loan thread, and within 30 minutes it fell of the front page despite having over 200 upvotes.

Same thing has been happening with articles on certain topics, such as fitness.

anonymouz
Probably those posts were considered to be off topic by the people flagging them. Maybe it would be nice to have a somewhat milder tool at our disposal for borderline cases (e.g. down voting of articles). I think weakening the flagging mechanism would make it harder to get rid of completely off topic or otherwise unfit posts quickly.
tptacek
If you're already having a great discussion, why are you getting upset about the thread's position on the front page? The discussion you want is happening.
tptacek
Flagging isn't the only thing that knocks stories off the front page. Another one is the flamewar detector; if the story has a particularly bad thread, the thread can kill it.

Another thing that might be hurting stories are voting rings. HN does (apparently) a lot of things (that we don't know about) to police voting on the site. Voting rings and collusion are a huge problem; the incentive to spam things onto HN is very high.

Flags aren't as powerful as you think they are. I flag lots of things but rarely notice an impact if the story already has traction.