
Hacker News, say hello to the Flagging Bury Brigades - swombat
I have to say, it's really disappointing to see the flagging functionality being abused in this way.<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438002 , which has had 47 points in 1 hour (despite being flagged by a number of individuals) is exactly on-topic for HN, It concerns a product that is relevant to HN, it is built by an active HN member, it has been upvoted by a good number of HNers despite its unnaturally low placement (due to the flagging), it is written by an active HNer (me), and it is on a blog which is popular with HN.<p>It's hard to think of a more on-topic post.<p>And yet, at least 4 people have flagged it, possibly 5, thus lowering its placement by a lot. Flagging is supposed to be reserved for egregiously off-topic and spam posts.<p>If this is what happens to on-topic posts, one thing is clear:<p><i>Flagging is totally broken.</i><p>Why? I suspect too many people have access to flags, so flags have become indiscriminate. Simultaneously, pg made flags have a very large effect on story position (effectively, one flag is worth maybe 5-10 downvotes, no matter who applies the flag).<p>I have long since learned not to try to coerce pg into doing anything, but I really think this is strong evidence of broken functionality. If you want to introduce downvotes for stories, let's have downvotes for stories. But let's not have mega-downvotes in the sneaky form of flags that are supposed to be for spam.<p>I'll add that this is not the first time I've seen this happen, though it's the first time I see a perfectly legitimate article get quite that many flags. Is HN skipping the Reddit step and going straight to the Digg graveyard?
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pg
No one flagged it. It set off the voting ring detector.

This is probably why: <http://twitter.com/swombat/statuses/57853143689601024>

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DanielBMarkham
The logical follow up question is: assuming swombat isn't part of a secret
cabal, how does he avoid setting it off in the future?

You probably can't answer that, but I know I like tweeting about my HN posts
and inviting folks over to HN to participate. If that's a bad thing, we need
to know that and not do it anymore.

EDIT: Is there is a prohibition against tweeting submissions?

EDIT2: Happy to abide by whatever rules there are, but without knowing them I
can see where it could get very frustrating for a lot of folks. A couple of my
submissions I was sure were being flagged, but now I'm guessing it's because I
shared the link with folks. That's an extremely non-intuitive system response.

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swombat
If tweeting about your posts and getting them exposure is a bad thing, this is
no forum for entrepreneurs.

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icey
This isn't a forum for entrepreneurs:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403868>

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swombat
Sad. I've told numerous people that this was the best online community of
entrepreneurs bar none. I guess we need a new one.

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vyrotek
Whoa, same here. I guess I will direct my referrals elsewhere from now on.

On that note. Where is the best online community for entrepreneurs then?

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bvi
> On that note. Where is the best online community for entrepreneurs then?

That's easy. Check out Hacker News. Oh wait...

