
Ask HN: Can we talk about the role of flagging on the front page? - nkurz
I&#x27;m often surprised by how large a role flagging plays for how long stories live on the front page.  For example, I presume most (all?) of the precipitous drops in this chart are due to user flags:<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;6&#x2F;1-10&#x2F;<p>That&#x27;s a lot of discussions that are prevented from happening because a small minority thinks they are inappropriate for the site.  Is this a good thing (because it preserves harmony) or a bad thing (because it shuts down productive discussion)?
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Mz
My vague hand-wavy understanding is that there is a team of unnamed mods
beyond the one we know the name of and they are capable of adding tags that
can get it dropped substantially. This apparently happened to one of my posts.

I have no idea what is good or bad at this point. But I can tell you that I
think what goes on here is probably a lot more complicated than you think it
is.

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jimrandomh
I'd worry that if flags were weakened too much, then the front page would
start having false stories on it. The ratio of flags to views is likely to be
much more informative than the ratio of upvotes to views, especially if
weighted by some metric of account trust.

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Tomte
It is a good thing not because it "preserves harmony", but because low-value
submissions (in your case: trying to stir up controversy with harsh words
where no "banning" exists) can be deemphasized and open up space for regular
submissions.

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dang
That's a fine general comment but I need to pipe up for nkurz. I don't think
he's ever tried to stir up controversy with harsh words. He's mostly concerned
with letting people have their say as a matter of openness.

You've probably noticed how often people insist that's what they care about
while their behavior suggests lower motives, but from everything I've seen,
nkurz really does.

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thenomad
Could you point out some examples of specific stories that you think dropped
due to flagging? It's an interesting point but looking at that graph I see
only one story that looks like it was probably flagged ("rent a minority").

There's a precipitous drop for both "Deco software: React native IDE" and
"convert CURL commands to GO", but both are after hours and hours on the front
page, and neither look like obvious flagging material :)

~~~
dang
> after hours and hours on the front page

The software downweights stories after they've been on the front page a long
time (currently 15 hours).

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thenomad
Thanks for confirming - that was what I assumed. I really couldn't see the HN
community suddenly getting their hate on for an article on converting CURL
commands to Go! :)

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imarg
Isn't there a way to see if an article was flagged? (I suppose that if you
have to deduct flagging from changes in ranking that there indeed isn't a way)

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imarg
Well it seems I was wrong, I just saw an article with a [flagged] indication.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11076832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11076832)

~~~
SamReidHughes
That means the submission is [dead], killed by user flags. Other submissions
might have had users click "flag" but not enough to become [dead].

~~~
imarg
Ok, but there is also a [dead] indication. What is the difference?

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SamReidHughes
My understanding is that since [flagged] is for stuff that was killed by user
flags, other dead stuff is dead for some other reason. Like automatic spam
detection, [dupe], moderator actions.

