[JoshTriplett]

Flagging does seem to primarily be a tool for moderation. But for comments, at least, I've mostly not observed flagging being used to hide things that shouldn't be; if anything, I think flagging is underused on comments.

(It's still regularly abused on stories as a downvote, perhaps in part because stories don't have downvotes. HN sometimes "rescues" stories that get over-flagged, but it's still a problem.)

[layer8]

Flagging isn’t done by moderators, it’s done by regular HN users.

[JoshTriplett]

I didn't say it was done by moderators, I said it was a tool for moderation. Flagging is the means by which regular HN users perform moderation activities, in addition to the actions available to the moderators.

[layer8]

Ok, I see. I understood “moderation policies” upthread to refer to what guides the actions of the moderators.

[JoshTriplett]

Fair enough, I can see from the thread how that interpretation could arise. I would definitely interpret "moderation policy" to be policy implemented by moderators. In this case, I was responding to the statement that "flagging is not moderation", and I thought it was useful to distinguish that flagging semantically is a kind of moderation (done by users rather than by moderators).

[layer8]

For me the difference is that moderation by moderators is (usually) guided by some content policy, and one can disagree about the biases of the specific content policy, or disagree about applying a content policy based on topics and themes at all (as opposed to based on mere style and civility). With user actions, there is no predefined content policy, it’s just how the set of users who happen to read the specific thread or comment happen to feel.

Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading. But I also think that active moderation and crowd-sourced ranking mechanics are two different things.

[JoshTriplett]

> Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading.

I think that's a very different kind of forum, and it needs different tools to be usable, and it more quickly fails into unusability.