

Random ideas for improving HN voting - jgrahamc

1. Public 'flags'.<p>What would people think if their flagging of an article were made public?  It surely wouldn't stop people flagging very off topic or spam posts, but perhaps it would limit other forms of flagging ('this author annoys me', 'this is about a language I hate').<p>2. A downvote quota.<p>Suppose you had unlimited upvotes, but a limit number (say 5) downvotes per day.  I'd hope people would choose to use them wisely
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thaumaturgy
As a semi-frequent flagger, I could appreciate #1. It would be nice to be able
to publicly state disapproval of a thing without having to clutter up the
comments section.

Re: #2, I don't really see the point. Downvotes here just aren't a problem.
Most of the items that are a light shade of grey are deserving of it, and even
then, given the size of HN's user base now and the score required to make
something a nice light shade of gray, I don't think limiting daily downvotes
would have any measurable effect at all.

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mooism2
I'm another frequent flagger. I'm not sure that I would get any benefit from
publicly stating disapproval without also stating _why_ I disapprove.

I think the problem with flagging is more that it's too easy for a link to
pick up enough flags to keep it off the front page --- imo, if a link hasn't
picked up enough flags to kill it, it hasn't picked up enough flags to
disqualify it from the front page.

(Re #2, I agree with you.)

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revorad
I don't know how the current flagging system works, but dealing with it in a
slightly more intelligent way could reduce the number of false positives. Some
basic filtering based on obviously spammy links, domains, language could be
used. For flagged posts which aren't caught by such a spam filter, let the
total number of flags decide.

Right now it seems that it only takes a couple of flags to push a story off
the front page.

