A word of warning to others: if you visit that page and actively flag, you may lose your flagging privileges. It happened to lots of us here when the Snowden story first broke - a lot of folks who regularly visited /newest to upvote/flag incoming stories lost their flagging privileges due to legitimately flagging the duplicates/blog spam/crap about the Snowden leaks. I can remember going to page 2 and 3 on /newest and 25 of the 30 stories shown would be dupes or crap about Snowden that was unworthy of HN. We got "punished" for doing what we thought was the right thing. And FYI - there is no timeout for lost flagging privileges that I know of.
I suspect that > 50% of the stories on /noobstories are flag-worthy but do yourself a favor and just flag 1/10th of the stories you think are bad/unworthy. It's an unfortunate side effect of the flagging/downvoting policy here at HN.
For what it's worth, I lost flagging privileges around that time, and appear to have got them back. There may be a timeout based on magnitude of "illegitimate" flagging or something like that.
Yes, I've since had mine restored. However, for mine at least, it happened the day after I posted a comment much like the one above. I suspect it was manual in my case. It could be that they reviewed/changed a whole bunch of people who lost the flagging privilege around that time as well, or it could be a timeout - I don't really know. I just know that, given how quickly my flagging privileges were restored after I made a similar comment in a popular thread, it appeared to be related to my comment.
I actually upvoted the Snowden Ted talk story from a couple days ago to have it deleted and my karma dropped by .7 overnight. Thought that was weird. If they are going to hellban stories why not just do it with code?
Idea for pg: Consider preventing accounts under a certain age (and/or karma) submitting stories. The limit could be really low (say, 24 hours and/or 5 karma) and I'm guessing it'd knock off 90% of the spam/trash problem..?
I would personally feel that that wouldn't help as much, as many of the new accounts are just people wishing to express their (perhaps unpopular) opinion without putting their main account and thus themselves in negative light.
Is there somewhere that describes all of the hidden features of HN? I hadn't seen these lists before and didn't know about the >250 karma colour changing. I assume there must be more features hidden somewhere too.
One neat feature I remember being around but can't seem to find a reference to so that I can use it again is some GET flag that reorganizes the front page to only count votes from users with old enough accounts. (Interestingly it didn't change that much so I stopped using it.)
Some sites are autokilled. For example, because they create new accounts to send spam. A few years ago pg posted a list and it was longest than I expected.
Most of the URL shorteners are autokilled, because someone can hide a banned site using it.
And I guess that Youtube has some kind of penalty, because there are a lot of off-topic submissions and many of them are dead, but not all.
Now that's embarrassing. Apparently I never bothered clicking that link. Maybe "User/comment lists" would have been more encouraging, if a bit clumsy-looking.
I suspect that > 50% of the stories on /noobstories are flag-worthy but do yourself a favor and just flag 1/10th of the stories you think are bad/unworthy. It's an unfortunate side effect of the flagging/downvoting policy here at HN.