Suggest HN & PG: Fix the flag button

[benaiah]

The flag button on HN is broken and needs to be fixed.

It seems like a good idea at first glance. Unfortunately, it instead ends up stifling discussion by allowing a limited cadre of people to remove posts that, while still interesting to most of us, they don't like. The most notable recent example is the rapid flagging of positive Surface Pro reviews, which consistently showed up below posts that had less upvotes and had been around longer.

It has a few main problems:

- Anyone can do it.

- A flag seems to negate more than one upvote.

- Flags are consistently used to silence discussion that some people don't like.

There have been several popular pleas recently to stop using the flag button inappropriately. While these may have had some effect, some people will continue to use it inappropriately, no matter how much we ask them not to. The flag has good intentions, but it's simply used as an extra-powerful downvote by many.

There are two immediately obvious solutions:

- Remove the flag button entirely.

- Add a significant karma threshold to the flag button. Since high-karma HN users are more likely to be active on the forum anyway, a small number of high-karma users can keep the spam off the site, while preventing a small number of users from preventing the community from organically choosing these to prominently display.

These fixes will not overrun HN with spam for the following reasons:

- Most users only see the frontpage. It already takes a large amount of upvotes in a short amount of time to reach the front page, and spam wouldn't generally achieve that.

- Spam generally doesn't show up on the new submissions page, indicating it's not being submitted that much in the first place.

- The moderators are quite vigilant when it comes to high-profile content. This can be readily seen by their constant retitling of posts that hit the front page. The tiny amount of spam that might hit the front page would be easily and quickly squashed.

[ChuckMcM]

I'll make the obligatory comment that if you want to opine about how HN should work, email "info". Its in the guidelines [1] and it saves time. Thanks.

[1] "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com."

[benaiah → ChuckMcM]

This isn't moderation (that would be the retitling posts that keep showing up). This is flagging, which is a user action.

Pedantry aside, you're probably right. I'll write them an email, though I'm not hopeful as to the results.

[brudgers]

Based upon reports, it is my understanding that people who abuse the flag button lose the option.

It is my impression that high karma does preclude people from flagging particular topics based upon their biases and preferences.

[benaiah → brudgers]

But it seems pretty obvious that these measures haven't fixed it.

In addition, it doesn't seem to be so much the high karma people that are the problem, rather the large numbers of low karma people who exercise their unfettered use of the flag button liberally and inappropriately.

Frankly, I don't see a good reason why flagging exists in the first place. Unrestricted downvoting is really what has made Reddit's community such a miserable morass, and flags are barely any better.

[brudgers → benaiah]

"But it seems pretty obvious that these measures haven't fixed it."

It is not obvious to me that flagging is broken. The discussions sparked by the first Surface Pro reviews were filled with partisan trolling and largely bereft of insight. It wasn't the news that was crap, but the community's reactions. The stupidity to intelligence ratio was high and the temperature was rising.

[DanBC]

You need to turn showdead on. There's plenty of spam on the New page.

Sometimes it only take 3 votes to get to the front page.

High karma users are just as capable of "misusing" the flag as low karma users.

You suggest that excessive flagging is a problem, but because of the opaque nature of the HN upvote / downvote / flagging system it's hard to know what got flagged and how many flags they got.

[benaiah → DanBC]

I apologize for the showdead mistake - that should have been pretty obvious. Still, these posts don't get upvoted, so the front page remains untrammeled, and showdead filters them out anyway.

There were some screenshots floating around recently (and I experienced the situation myself) where a positive Surface Pro review was showing up far below other, older posts with fewer upvotes. This is just the most recent example - it's come up many times.