I have scrolled through several pages and this post is no longer in the top 200 on HN. I have never seen the flame-war penalty hit anything close to that hard that quickly. I am pretty sure this is from user flagging.
It may be. I've also now read through most of this thread and I can say categorically that for me, this thread is now mostly full of dross, and I'd be tempted to flag it as being of negative value to HN.
I haven't, but I can see why others would. Like it or hate it, the purpose of the voting system is to provide a direction for the content. You may disagree, but it's like elections - you get what "the community" deems valuable or relevant.
There's a lot of stuff I post that sinks without trace, and other things that get downvoted into obvlivion even though I personally think they are of positive value.
I am not suggesting we remove the ability to downvote or flag. I still want the community to decide most of these things. I simply want more accountability for these actions so they aren't used for petty reasons. You would be free to flag this post for causing a comment section full of garbage. You would just have to say that rather than flagging and moving on.
That would lead to a ton of comments saying why they had flagged or downvoted things. Such comments tend to be of low quality and (if people could reply) would lead to endless bickering. IMO it's much better for signal/noise ratio not to go there.
I once spoke to the creator of a much larger forum than HN, who told me the biggest mistake they made was to add a meta facility to the site.
I respect your position but I don't agree with your conclusions:
> That would lead to a ton of comments saying why they had flagged or downvoted things. Such comments tend to be of low quality
It's only low quality if the reasons for down voting are low quality and since the purpose of forced replies is to weed out low quality moderation, I think the ends justify the means.
> and (if people could reply) would lead to endless bickering.
People already bicker about the moderation. Constantly. What I'd hope to see it fewer people impulsively moderating posts. Which might have the ironic effect of reducing some of the complaints.
Obviously those who have a tendency to bicker will likely continue to do so but that will be little change to what they're already doing now.
> I once spoke to the creator of a much larger forum than HN, who told me the biggest mistake they made was to add a meta facility to the site.
That may also turn out to be true for HN but equally it may not. Every forum and community is different so what works in one place might not work in another -- and visa versa. As it is, the quality of comments have and peer moderation has already been on a downwards trajectory for a few years now so it's probably worth trying some new ideas to see if it does shake the less confident yet still experienced engineers back into contributing thoughtful posts.
I think the idea is that when you flag or downvote you have to provide a comment on the action, and that comment is then displayed when someone asks for a list of downvotes and/or flags. Those comments are not part of the regular comment system, and one can't reply to them.
It's what happens on Lobsters, but whether or not it makes a difference is hard to say. The traffic is small enough that I doubt the effect is properly measurable.
Right, but however you expose that information, aren't you just providing nucleation sites for meta-debates? This is a site that practically begs users to generate opinions about everything; you can't even pick the background color for your blog post without potentially sparking a 10-comment subthread about it. Off-topic meta arguments are arguably the biggest problem comment threads on HN have.
