
Comment Flagging on HN as of Late - hootbootscoot
Is it just me or is comment-flagging becoming the default means of disagreeing here?
Isn&#x27;t that feature supposed to be reserved for anti-socially ridiculously deliberately offensive materials that need to be removed etc?<p>I&#x27;m also less and less convinced about this &quot;points voting system&quot; in which a downvote costs the downvoting person nothing, nor is any justification necessary.<p>I would like to see a flag require a submitted textual reason, and downvotes require a comment postulating a coherent and logical motive, that obviously needn&#x27;t be agreed-upon, but some input of some kind to raise the bar needed to damage someone.
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t0astbread
On a similar thread a few months ago someone commented that another discussion
forum they use requires one of a handful of pre-defined reasons for a vote
(both up- and downvotes). It's a simple dropdown so it doesn't add a lot of
friction to voting. Different reasons have different impacts on the
commenter's reputation score (for example "hate speech" has a greater penalty
than "low quality" and stuff like that). I can't recall what the site was
called though.

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DoreenMichele
There's a pandemic on. The entire world has cabin fever and is cranky as all
hell.

This is not a good time to make sweeping policy changes in reaction to people
being cranky and mildly ill-behaved in their voting patterns.

Trying to make systemic changes to address this is how the world becomes more
draconian. It doesn't become more civilized when you double down on "All y'all
assholes better behave, damn it."

During crisis times in my life, when the kids were spazzing, my answer was
usually "Go to bed and get some sleep. You're tired and cranky and we can
discuss this tomorrow after you've slept."

Being more hard-line controlling instead of kind and compassionate and wise is
the usual answer in situations like this. It's also the wrong answer and one
of the reasons we've inherited so much crap from the past.

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donatj
I have personally recently seen things a number of things flagged I really
would have liked to have seen discussed. It's definitely taken seen an uptick
recently.

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kreetx
Would you mind linking some of them?

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donatj
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24045615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24045615)
is the most recent example and the only one I remember off the top of my head.

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jgwil2
In the very first reply, dang explains that the account was banned for
repeated violations, so it's not just the content of that particular comment
that got it flagged, but rather the account itself was banned so the comment
was marked dead.

Frankly, however, if the commenter had wanted to create a discussion rather
than troll, they could have used a vastly different tone. Just because there
might be some interesting topic buried under the layers of sarcasm doesn't
necessarily redeem it. If you want to discuss it, maybe you could elaborate on
what you found interesting and post a separate response to the parent, and do
so more civilly than this comment.

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donatj
I missed that, dang commented that after I saw the post yesterday and I didn't
bother rereading the comments today.

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sct202
Who has the ability to flag comments, like is it one of those unlockable
features when you hit X karma? I see that I can flag posts, but I've never
seen the flag comment button.

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DanBC
If you click the timestamp of a comment it takes you to a page with more
options. This is also where you can find the [vouch] link for comments that
you think have been unfairly killed.

I think there's a small karma threshold of maybe 50 or so?

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justin66
> some input of some kind to raise the bar needed to damage someone.

"Damage someone?" You're taking this too seriously.

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AnimalMuppet
Does flagging happen automatically (without moderation)? That is, if N users
flag a post, does it get flagged? Or does it tell dang that N users have
flagged it, and he makes a decision?

I myself flag posts for hostility to other users, or for blatant shilling
(political or commercial). I don't think I do so for much beside those.

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detaro
> _Does flagging happen automatically (without moderation)?_

Yes.

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dgb23
To add to that: not all up/downvotes are equal.

Sometimes I upvote something that I find very informative and interesting and
sometimes because I mildly like it.

I personally only downvote stuff I find very hostile and/or low effort
“noise”. It seems that most people do it this way. Except in cultural
discussions (includes tech culture).

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notacoward
FWIW, I haven't noticed a significant change in flagging or downvoting
comments, for the conversations I follow. However, there does seem to be a an
uptick in flagging _posts_.

> I would like to see a flag require a submitted textual reason

Thought experiment: how could that be abused? And what would we do about that?

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hootbootscoot
sql injection? escape all inputs, lol.

go on though, I'm curious.

I was thinking "this person repeated the same comment 10 times" works as well
as "they mentioned pudding and i hate pudding"... The bar to click down-arrow
instead of up-arrow is lower than limbo-ing under a park bench ATM, that's
all...one could inadvertently do it. One could go on a spree just downvoting
every comment ever. "Just you try to stop me!" etc.

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notacoward
What happens when the content of a downvote comment itself violates the rules?

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bobosha
Perhaps more nuance is called for, by having a sliding scale of rating -1
<\---> +1

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hootbootscoot
oooh, kudos for floating-point usage! I like it.

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kanobo
I largely agree. I wonder whether people should have to pay (in points?) to
comment, this would demotivate people who have just have nothing of value to
contribute and those who are simply trying to gain points because it would be
an investment. Is that a bad idea?

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malechimp
+1 Same feelings, outlook and perceived quality of discourse exactly.

Couldn't agree more with the proposed countermeasures. Kudos for stepping up
and proposing them.

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malechimp
For fucks sake. And I get downvoted for this? Are we serious?

I've been articulating the problem for months now as have others. Obviously
there's no intention from the benevolent dictators of HN to change anything.
That's fine. Their house, their rules. But I for one refuse to put myself
through the toxicity of a troll-gutter.

I'm done here.

Bye

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moxylush
Agreed.

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s9w
More politics, more flagging. HN is at times overwhelmingly political
recently, and I'm afraid this will not get better until the election.

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mjayhn
Has this site had any UX/UI updates in years? I've always assumed assumed it's
"done" and we just have to deal with what it is. I come here less and less
because of how feature-free and bad the UX is. Everything is a click to
another page, then click back to what you were doing. Why do I need to go to
another page to favorite an article? It causes me to hardly use the feature
because it's such an interruption.

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DoreenMichele
Yes, they do updates to the UI. They do them so quietly and carefully that
there is a persistent delusion (or meme) that the "UI never changes."

