Ask HN: What's up with all the unjustified flagging? - crehn
======
gus_massa
Do you have an example or two? It's more easy to understand your complain with
an example. Perhaps they are off-topic. From:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003501)

> _What to Submit_

> _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
> more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
> answer might be: anything that gratifies one 's intellectual curiosity._

> _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they
> 're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political
> battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal
> pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic._

Anyway, for an official answer or if you see another story wrongly flagged,
you can write to the mods: hn@ycombinator.com

>

~~~
nicolashahn
Not the OP but I just happened to click on this (request for highly
intelligent people to share experiences) in my RSS feed:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007404)
and couldn't really see a reason why it would be flagged, besides maybe being
in slightly bad taste and attracting r/iamverysmart types.

I also noticed something strange with a thread comment I made a few days ago.
It had a link to a Youtube video that some might find politically incorrect
(people talking about IQ being a predictor of success and homogenous societies
being less violent). It was immediately downvoted several times but spawned a
large discussion thread. All my replies within the thread seemed to be purely
upvoted, but were in line with what I was saying in my original comment. After
a while (several hours), the original comment made it to positive points as
well.

That made me think that there was some (possibly politically motivated) band
of users that were scanning for certain things to downvote, and the video I
linked or perhaps the other content of my comment met their qualifications.
They immediately hit my parent comment (and overlooked my other replies),
driving it to the bottom of the page, but it eventually managed to crawl back
on its own merit.

I'm probably just paranoid, though this thread increases my suspicions.

------
jasonkostempski
Even if it's not the intended purpose, it's the downvote button of HN.

