
Ask HN: How to prevent abusive flagging of posts on HN? - crazygringo
This morning there was a #1 ranked story about Tim Berners Lee on HN that had gathered over 110 points and maybe 30 comments in less than half an hour.<p>So it was clearly of great interest to the HN community, but it apparently rubbed some people the wrong way. One commenter wished they could downvote it, and another suggested that flagging submissions is an option.<p>A few minutes later, the post appeared as [flagged] and had completely disappeared from the front page. Myself and a couple of others commented we were surprised it had been flagged, that we thought the discussion was valuable.<p>I&#x27;m not going to link to it here because that&#x27;s not my point, and I don&#x27;t want this post to be flagged either.<p>My point is: should just a couple (presumably) people be able to flag a post to silence debate on a topic of inherent interest to hackers?<p>It doesn&#x27;t feel right that a tiny number of people can quell a valuable discussion for a much larger number of people.<p>Is there a way to prevent abuse of flagging like this?
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Tomte
Mail the moderators. They can unflag the story.

Abstractly speaking: Overwhelmingly the flags are correct, and you should
think hard whether it's really a case of "quelling a valuable discussion".

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uberman
I just read the article (what I assume is the article) and I would not
characterize flagging of it abuse of the system.

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downerending
Not sure about "preventing", but a great solution to this problem would be a
sort of recommendation system that would show each user articles that other
users "like" them generally wanted to see. We don't all like the same music,
and there's little reason to think we all want to read (or flag) the same
articles, either.

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jppope
I would like to add I wish there was a way to clear paywalled content...
flagging seems like the wrong way to do it...but its the only option currently

