Ask HN: Make Flagging Activity Public?
It is my understanding that the HN code-base is pretty much write-only so it's probably a tall ask but I think it would help confidence in the site at this... turbulent time globally, if people could do their own investigation of which accounts are jumping on stories to kill them.
This would be useful irrespective of your political slant, e.g. on issues like Israel-Palestine.
For the example story there are a few possibilities:
- people are sick of 'political' stories and flag them out of tedium
- there is a prevailing pro-Trump, anti-science majority of active users on the site
- there are active influence campaigns using sock-puppet accounts to hide and prevent discussion of ongoing attacks on science
The most likely answer is all-of-the-above. But why should such anti-speech activity as flagging be private? This may already be possible via the API so I'd be interested to learn that if so.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961584
I often flag submissions or comments when they go against the rules (sometimes written, sometimes unwritten) of the site.
I'm generally not willing to:
So, if these flags become public, I'll just stop flagging. I'm sure I'm not alone. I consider this a negative outcome of making flags public.a) exceed the likelihood of people doing this via commenting anyway
b) justify the opaque and powerful nature of flagging as-is
Perhaps you stopping flagging if you're not willing to justify a flag is a good outcome in aggregate? We have mods to kill threads which violate the guidelines already. But looking at the /active list there's certainly an amount of (probably organic) censorship of controversial threads in either direction (though my gut feel is it biases more towards censorship of articles about the latest outrages of US government).
I'm not really interested in say, Ruby, I think people should probably use languages which are type-safe if they want to avoid catastrophes in production and 1am pager calls. However if I see an article about Ruby I'm just going to not engage with it. Perhaps your existing interpretation of the unwritten rules is too broad and actually we ought to rein in the amount of flagging anyway?
I think a lot of us are generally happy with how the site operates—that's why we're here. I personally consider the moderation to be a feature—I think dang and team do a great job. I'm sure you could pick out some counterexamples but comments and posts that rise to the top tend to be thoughtful. There are exceptions. Nobody bats 1.000.
Posters don't have a right to be seen/read. That said, there are plenty of other communities that will embrace the types of posts/threads that would get flagged here.
If you have specific concerns about specific comments/stories getting flagged, it's reasonable to take each one up with the moderation team privately (there's a contact link in the footer). Just don't badger them—becoming a nuisance won't help you achieve your goals.
This would allow anyone to perform network analysis and reporting and full audit ability and is a minimal level of accountability for using this functionality to close discussions down.
And what would be the purpose of this? "Audits" are meaningless when you have no ability to affect procedures.
The mods already have this data and they already choose to allow what they will. Neither you or I or anyone else has the right to hold anyone here accountable for their behavior - indeed, the guidelines explicitly prohibit doing so in most cases, because it makes for "boring reading."
Before the usual retorts come that I can only afford to think that way because I’m not a member of a “disaffected group”, my still living parents dealt with the Jim Crow south and my son who grew up in the suburbs all of his life still got looked at with suspicion walking around in our neighborhood.
But that doesn’t mean I want to see a dozen post a day about police brutality, BLM, the inequities in the justice system or whatever anti woke BS Trump was talking about today on HN.
What possible good discussion could come out of a post about Palestine vs Israel unless it was a technical “innovation” [sic] that one side or the other was using?
I think a lot of people agree with your reasons for flagging and wish politics didn't cross over into tech, but that doesn't really impinge either way on making flags public. (In the example article that prompted this a debate about the relative benefits of different vaccine research approaches seems patently tech/science based, but again it is not really relevant to a proposal to make the flags public record).
Perusing active at the moment it looks like a fairly quiet time for flagging, though the example didn't get to active so it's a lopsided sample. The flagged articles are roughly:
- UBI doesn't work because the poor are lazy
- 2 different aliens/UFOs related articles
- Zohran Mamdani and reaction of tech scene in NYC
- Israeli settler violence in the west bank
I don't really see a compelling argument that any of these except perhaps west bank violence is worthy of a flag. We have tools to deal with these topics already such as the front page fall off for flame wars. I don't think the site is enhanced by flagging in it's current state and absent a larger change like increasing the flag karma to be closer to vouch karma so recovery is less lopsided, I think at least being transparent about flagging helps restore confidence in the system and would help reduce conspiracy thinking.
Makes sense to me why that story got flagged.
>- people are sick of 'political' stories and flag them out of tedium
Looking at active page, pretty minimal politics. So they are being flagged, the reasoning is unknown.
>- there is a prevailing pro-Trump, anti-science majority of active users on the site
lol the polar opposite is quite true. Virtually no support for trump on HN. Most of us arent in the USA, and those ive seen who are, are clearly democrats. Us Canadians hate trump pretty much, even the Maple MAGA crowd has disappeared.
>- there are active influence campaigns using sock-puppet accounts to hide and prevent discussion of ongoing attacks on science
<tinfoil> tags missing?
We have dang's word that he hasn't detected any funky behavior with respect to flagging and that these are organic events. But I don't see a reason that the information shouldn't be available. I struggle to think of a downside.
Not really relevant to your main point but the idea there aren't social media influence campaigns from all sides is more of a tinfoil position than acknowledging that there absolutely are, whether or not they are effective.