

Ask PG: How Critical Should I Be? (meta - flagging) - jcr

I'm definitely in the "up-vote the good stuff" camp, but contributing to
HN includes the far less enjoyable tasks of occasionally down-voting and
flagging.<p>I know HN employs an "excessive flagging" threshold to prevent abusive
flagging (pg mentioned this eons ago, but I can't find the link). The
"Enough rope to hang yourself" design works well with engaged users who
care about the quality of HN, but the design seems to break down when
there's too much bad stuff to flag/down-vote. The most obvious break
down is when emotions run high on some topic, and we're flooded with bad
comments, throw-away trolling accounts, and redundant but up-voted
submissions. But on everyday terms, if I was to flag every single
violation of the site guidelines I see in the /newest queue, I'd very
quickly hang myself on the anti-abuse code.<p>Even seemingly well-intentioned people get hung by the anti-abuse code:<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454106<p>Too much of a good thing is often bad, and a well-intentioned person
with an itchy mouse finger could easily flag too much. At present,
there's just no way to know where the "too much" line is, or what kind
of infractions should be flagged.<p>pg, could you provide more guidance on what you want to be flagged?<p>I've got a few ideas for potential ways to provide feedback on good/bad
flags to users in their profiles without spoiling the anti-abuse code. I
could either email them to you or post them up in the "Feature Request"
thread where they belong.<p>p.s. Also could you please add "gossip" and "X is down" messages to the
list of off topic stuff in the site guidelines?
======
buro9
On the forums I run I have the policy that to flag something is an exceptional
thing... and that when it happens it's because something exceptional has
occurred.

I feel that the whole flagging system is for two reasons:

1) Legal enforcement against illegal material: child porn, hate material, etc.

2) The way in which the community communicates to me the community
standards... where the subjective line of acceptability is

In the first instance, I only receive a couple of flags a year even on a
community with 250k actives per month.

On the second, I receive a flag every day or two.

Flags generate emails to all of the admins and moderators, it's a "drop things
and look at this" event.

When we receive a flag we will ignore it if: The person is an habitual flagger
(over-sensitive), or the person always flags the subject of the flag (chip-on-
shoulder/bias).

We're attempting to listen to and gently adjust the subjective acceptable
standards that are communicated to us, but without introducing a system in
which a small number create a wild amount of vocal bias.

Hence... if someone flags often, they lose their ability to flag as they're
creating disproportionate noise in the feedback mechanism.

So long as people on the communities I run reserve the flag for the truly
exceptional and unacceptable, then everything works well.

Now, assuming similar intent in the system exists here, I'd say it's best to
avoid flagging unless it's essential to flag.

~~~
jcr
Thanks for the input. Great points.

The flagging system on HN shares some similar aspects to the ones you
mentioned (congrats on 250K active users!), but in many ways, it's a
completely different system and has a slightly different intent. It only takes
a few flags from established users for new submission to be marked [dead] and
invisible to most people, save those who have "show dead" enabled in their
profile. In this sense, HN flagging is designed to crowd-source the task of
removing spam, abuse, and off-topic material from the site.

Essentially, flagging is community cleanup, and it's the reason why the flag
link is so prominent... --You probably remember when the front page didn't
have flag links. For a long time, only the /newest page had easily accessible
'flag' links. The change of putting 'flag' links on the front page was made
because junk kept getting up-voted onto the front page, and since most people
didn't know how to flag (by visiting the 'link' link), the result was
discussions about inappropriateness.

Flags on HN work differently than what you described. If you flag something
and it gets flagged by enough other people (tempered by anti-abuse ring
flag/vote detection) to be marked [dead], then it was a "good" flag.
Similarly, if you flag something and _not_ enough others flag it to become
[dead], then it was a "bad" flag. The more "good" flags you make, the more
weight is given to them, and of course, the more "bad" flags you make, the
less weight is given to them.

(NOTE: Above I'm paraphrasing something pg posted eons ago, and I can't find
the link, so I might not have the details perfect, and the details may have
changed since then.)

Also, flags reduce rank in the HN sorting, but exactly how flags reduce rank
is undisclosed (contra-factor --see pg's second post here):

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417>

If you flag something, and it does not go [dead], your flag still has some
effect, but the details of whether said flag is "good" or "bad" are unknown.
All I can say for sure is if something is highly up-voted, and also heavily
flagged (i.e. _contro_ versial), it sinks down the ranking and off the front
page very quickly even if it is never marked [dead].

It's a very clever design, reduces the workload on mods/admins, and enables
you to do some other interesting stuff...

Most of the details are not public, but I'd bet PG uses the good/bad ratio to
determine things like the per-user threshold value where flagging is disabled
for a user. I also suspect it would take some other count and/or good/bad
threshold of flags per-submission or per-post for admins/moderators to be
bothered with any kind of alert. Why bother the mods/admin when enough known-
good users have flagged it to [dead]? These two points are pure speculation on
my part, but having the good/bad flag ratio per-user allows you to lighten the
workload on mods/admins.

Of course, pg not elaborate on the anti-abuse code, and I sincerely doubt he
will neither confirm nor deny anything I've said publicly because he just
can't without jeopardizing the effectiveness of his anti-abuse code. (Yes, I'm
intentionally giving him an out).

On the other hand, having PG provide a bit more instruction on what he wants
flagged could be really useful to the users watching the /newest queue,
prevent well-intentioned folks from unnecessarily triggering the abusive-
flagger threshold, and at the same time, help improve the quality on HN.

------
mahesh_rm
This is a good point. It happened to me for one of my very occasional HN
posts, in which I presented our startup idea to HN for feedback. It was
flagged for no apparent reasons while on front page top, and this impaired
quite a lot its visibility. I'm not implying there were any deliberate
malicious attempts, or organized obscure interests, behind flagging it, but as
of today, I can't understand why it was. It would perhaps be useful to include
a mandatory short motivation whenever you are flagging a post, which may be
automatically delivered to authors' HN profile, so that they may be able to
more easily understand the reasons behind the report.

------
biot
I tripped this flagging threshold a while back, flagging submissions which I
thought were offtopic for HN. Alas, no more "flag" links for me. Apparently,
one shouldn't flag stories as a substitute for the fact that they can't be
downvoted.

~~~
matthewcocco
To my knowledge, links actually can be downvoted - but only after you yourself
have >500 karma.

~~~
jcr
No, after 500 karma, you can down-vote comments, but not submissions.

I fairly sure there is a second karma threshold (or other gating mechanism)
which gives you the ability to down-vote someone who you've replied to, or is
replying to you. --I'm not sure how it works, and it's not public information,
so asking for details is pointless.

In essence, the second level seems to mean you're trusted to use down-votes
wisely.

Personally, I often up-vote people who reply to me with disagreements (even if
they are too strongly worded). My reason is simple; I may never agree with
them, but I _DO_ appreciate the time they took to give me their point of view.

~~~
tokenadult
_I fairly sure there is a second karma threshold (or other gating mechanism)
which gives you the ability to down-vote someone who you've replied to, or is
replying to you._

I'd like a reality check on this statement. What have other users observed? I
think the routine behavior is that users with downvote privileges on comments
can downvote comments other than those that are direct replies to their own
comments and submissions. But I could be mistaken. What is the general case
for most users who can downvote at all?

I agree with the OP that the best policy here is upvote what is good. Upvote
early and often if you see good stuff.

A previous thread I saw suggested flagging blogspam ruthlessly, because that
supports the community guideline "Please submit the original source. If a blog
post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

~~~
biot
I would like to be able to upvote stories without the story going into the
"saved stories" section of my user profile. I use this (perhaps obsolete)
feature as a means to mark things I would like to reference later, and
upvoting everything which was quality but which I don't want to reference
again would defeat the purpose.

Having a separate "save" link which puts articles into the saved stories
section would address this use case. Or perhaps one day I should go back
through all my saved stories and bookmark the ones which are still relevant so
that I can upvote all submissions which are good. Maybe a future version of HN
will do away with "saved stories" as it's likely the intent of upvoting
articles is meant to be the same as upvoting comments... and there's no "saved
comments" section.

------
tomasien
I've had 2 things that I thought weren't great but weren't terrible flagged
and pushed to spot 301 in the last couple months. I don't know if they should
have been or if it was excessive.

They were:

<http://yourereallypretty.com> <http://tommy.authpad.com/this-is-why-you-ship>

------
nonamegiven
The spirit of Postel's Law applies:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel#Postel.27s_Law>

Upvote a lot.

Ignoring is usually better than downvoting.

Flag anything that's a blatant retail advertisement. "The best shoes at
rockbottom prices!"

------
huhtenberg
On that note - mods and supers, can I please have my flagging privileges back?

------
recoiledsnake
I've losy my flagging ability a long time ago too. Whats more concerning is
the abuse of the flagging system to hide articles people that don't want
others to seee. like articles not showing Apple or Google in a good light, or
articles friendly to Microsoft... like the Surface review, for example.

