
Ask HN: Who is flagging legitimate stories? - shduyuisdfiu
I don&#x27;t know if this is a trend necessarily, but in the last 2 days I&#x27;ve seen 2 stories that I found interest in being flagged.<p>Does anyone monitor this sort of thing?  And if so does HN take away &quot;flagging&quot; privileges from those who abuse it?
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Tomte
Yes, they take flagging privileges away. Happened to me (shadow-flagging, my
flags made no difference anymore – but my flagging privileges seem to have
been restored in the meantime), of course without merit. ;-)

I'm also flummoxed by some flags.

Like my election results submissions just a few minutes ago. Yes, it's not
final, but projections are very accurate, and every major news outlet is
reporting those.

Also a really bizarre medical story, which should fit HN's mission very well.
People flagged it without comment. I thought, okay, it sounds outlandish,
maybe people thought it was fake. So I submitted a bit later the peer-reviewed
article in a reputable medical journal. Flagged without comments again.

~~~
greenyoda
> Like my election results submissions just a few minutes ago. Yes, it's not
> final, but projections are very accurate, and every major news outlet is
> reporting those.

The HN Guidelines say:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV
news, it's probably off-topic."

Election results are (1) politics and (2) covered on TV news.

But I'm puzzled about why your medical story got flagged. Could you post the
link in a comment so we can see what it was?

~~~
gus_massa
I guess one of the articles is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014408)
I think that articles for and against homeopathy are autokilled. Perhaps the
OP can write to the mods.

The other article is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20016826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20016826)
I'd blame also USA-centrism. A similar article about an election in USA would
probably survive, and next year we will have an invasion of political
articles. Probably it is a good idea to avoid posting all the election in all
countries, but perhaps we can use a rule that says that we care about the
countries that have nukes. (If it works in the UN, it can work in HN :).) (Hi
from Argentina!)

~~~
greenyoda
> I guess one of the articles is
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014408)
> I think that articles for and against homeopathy are autokilled. Perhaps the
> OP can write to the mods.

This article is marked "[dead]", not "[flagged][dead]", so it wasn't killed by
user flags. Either the domain is banned, or the article was killed by a
moderator.

Since that article looks OK (it's a summary of scientific research), I've
"vouched" it, and it's now alive again.

