That's the biggest problem here: People using "flag" as a mega-downvote to eliminate things they don't want other people to read from the front page.
HN has a little "| hide |" button under each article that you can click if you don't want to see the article. I wish people just used that and moved on. The only reason you'd flag is if you don't want other people to see the article.
> I don’t think I have ever downvoted or flagged anything. I actually enjoy reading stuff which is controversial or against the grain, even if I don’t agree. Unfortunately voting here seems to be like reddit where you are really voting if you agree with the opinion, and then power users can just nuke your post/comments if they don’t like what you say.
I so much agree with this being one of the biggest issues in Hackernews in my opinion. (I love hackernews but this has genuine impact where genuine posts can get flagged just because it might be negative but that just feels like very much so censorship in some part) and whenever people mention why flagged? people say the moderation's bad and everything (I admit I must have said this once or twice too when getting angry why posts are getting flagged left and right) & then people mention how moderation's not the fault and its always been this way or similar & we just get really tangential.
The real reason probably seems to be this instead.
We probably need some net negative in case someone intentionally flags something like if they flagged a post (>4 hours) and moderators find that they flagged incorrectly, just have it be visible that they flagged such post.
If there was a genuine mistake, I am sure that moderators will be able to do so but we won't really go around then with people flagging anything or everything that they don't like (some of which might be political news)
I agree this has recently been heavily abused by certain people who don't want to see articles from a particular topic (usually a controversial one). And I've seen HN comments where someone will say "I don't come to HN to read about XYZ, so I'm flagging all XYZ posts I see." Some of these do get reversed by the moderators (who do a good job all things considered), but by that time they're gone from the home page and fall into oblivion.
So what, that's just a single curated view of a wealth of submissions and comments. There are many people who rarely look at "the front page" and suffer not from frontophilia.
> and fall into oblivion.
Hardly. the /newcomments and /active pages clearly show where the actions at, if that's your thing. Many [flagged] and not-the-front-page submissions have huge comment conts and go back and forth for days.
You can see an alternative listing at https://hckrnews.com/ , you can also subscribe to the RSS feed.
I don’t think I have ever downvoted or flagged anything. I actually enjoy reading stuff which is controversial or against the grain, even if I don’t agree. Unfortunately voting here seems to be like reddit where you are really voting if you agree with the opinion, and then power users can just nuke your post/comments if they don’t like what you say.
> That's the biggest problem here: People using "flag" as a mega-downvote to eliminate things they don't want other people to read from the front page.
I've seen the moderators (tomhow specifically) explicitly encourage people to use the flag option on posts which are low quality. I believe that the behavior you are complaining about is working as intended.
We encourage users to flag comments and submissions that are bad for HN – i.e., that break the guidelines.
When we see that a comment or submission has been unfairly flagged, we'll turn off the flags and restore its visibility and rank.
When we see users exhibiting a pattern of flagging things due to political disagreement or other reasons that are unaligned with the guidelines, we disable their flagging privileges.
HN has a little "| hide |" button under each article that you can click if you don't want to see the article. I wish people just used that and moved on. The only reason you'd flag is if you don't want other people to see the article.