

Ask the mods: Why did this article get flagged? - hoprocker

Honest question. This seemed like a rational, engaging, non-offensive article. &#x27;Flagging&#x27; is like leaning on your car horn in traffic instead of asking about what&#x27;s causing the holdup.<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;socialistworker.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;class-capitalism-and-the-tech
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nkurz
Seems like a great article. Presumably it was flagged because someone glanced
at the domain name and assumed it was off-topic. Or, as you hint, because
someone has an adverse reaction to the word 'socialism'. If this thread
doesn't get a response from him, email Dan at 'hn@ycombinator.com' and see if
he can help to rehabilitate it.

~~~
geebee
It was a worthwhile article. It wasn't inflammatory at all, and it was
insightful. You don't have to agree with the overall political analysis to
feel that this was a worthy and substantial contribution to the discussion of
very important issues in tech.

I have some sympathy for the mods in that I don't see all the submissions that
get flagged. It could be that without aggressive flagging, which will
inevitably lead to some "errors" (this getting flagged that perhaps shouldn't
have). It could be that HN would turn into nothing but flame wars about
politics and complaints about the tech industry. People complain about what HN
has turned into, but the quality of discussion here remains much higher
(vastly higher, in many cases) than a lot of other forums. Craigslist, a while
back, devolved from a good forum into something essentially unreadable.

Still, I have my doubts as to whether an article similar in treatment, depth,
and tone, but from a libertarian point of view, would have been flagged. In
this case, I do think it was a mistake to flag and remove this article, though
I appreciate that any meaningful defense of a good discussion forum will
inevitably involve a few mistakes like this.

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Mithaldu
Flagging often isn't done by mods, but by users. I could for example flag
yours and if enough others did, your question would automatically be hidden. I
don't know if mods had anything to do with that one, but it's quite possible
they didn't.

~~~
hoprocker
Ah, thanks. Title changed.

 _edit_ Hm, seemed to preempt myself on that. I guess the post is fixed now.

~~~
dang
Someone emailed about it and we fixed it. That's the preferred way to ask us a
question. We don't see all the posts that try to ask us something, but we do
see all the emails.

For completeness, here's what I told the user who emailed:

Users flagged it. User flags make a post drop in rank and, when enough users
do it, eventually kill the post. When there's an ongoing discussion, we
typically unkill the post so that comments can continue. That's what I've done
here.

~~~
nkurz
When you say you "fixed it", does this include removing the rank penalty? Or
does the post remain lowered in rank? I'd presumed that you tended to manually
review flagged posts, and then make a judgement as to whether the flags are
appropriate. But if even "inappropriate" use of flagging can keep posts off
the front page, it's still a pretty powerful tool. I'd feel more comfortable
knowing that permanent removal from the front page requires an explicit
editorial decision, at least upon review.

~~~
dang
In most cases, we unkill the thread so it stays open for comments, but do not
turn off the rank penalty. Occasionally, though, we do turn it off. Some easy
cases are when a good article has a bad title and people were flagging the
title (solution: change the title and turn off flags), or when there is
evidence of a flagging ring (solution: turn off flags and ignore future flags
from the offenders).

The harder cases are posts like this one, where the community is divided on a
political question, some want it on HN and others don't. In that case we
usually stop short of overriding the rank penalty. The voting and flagging
systems have been in a stable equilibrium for years, and we've learned that
it's a mistake to fight that very much or very often.

But we do do it sometimes, I'd guess maybe 10% of the time (but haven't looked
at the data). For example, sometimes an article is so substantive and
otherwise so obviously a good fit for HN that it doesn't seem fair to the
community to let the flags have their usual say. Sometimes a thread turns out
to be unexpectedly high-quality and not a flamewar. And sometimes a story is
of so much interest to the community that we couldn't stop it even if we
wanted to (a recent example being the Strange Loop/Yarvin thing), in which
case we turn flagging off for hopefully the best submission on the topic and
treat the others as dupes.

In the end, there's no escaping editorial judgment, though not every HN user
shares your positive view of it. We try not to over-exercise it, but never
doing so would be suboptimal for the community. There's a tragedy of the
commons paradox in there somewhere.

~~~
hoprocker
Thanks for the insight into how you folks try keep things sane on here.

------
icebraining
Inadvertently, HeadlineHawk has shown you the probable reason: there are
plenty of people who will knee-jerk downvote just because of its source and
POV, and HN is far from free from that.

