[dang]

Damn you people for asking good questions that go straight to the fuzzy areas!

I don't know for sure yet. But you're right that that would follow from what I said.

What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN. But this should rely on their reading of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not just be based on a like/dislike reaction. That is, users should flag articles that they think break the site guidelines, not just ones they dislike.

[sph]

I have been discouraging people from flagging ‘articles that they think don't belong on HN’, because you have disabled my ability to do so time and time again. In private conversation with you, you have confirmed that if I flag/vouch stuff you mods don’t agree with, I get the privilege taken away, even if I genuinely believe a post to fall outside of the guidelines.

So either I read your mind, or it is best not to flag unless something is obviously, unequivocally, running afoul of the guidelines.

I keep being annoyed at how arbitrary, and dare I say hypocritical, the entire flagging mechanism and its surrounding politics are.

[PennRobotics]

Flagging, to me, seems like pissing in the wind. If I notice serial posters submitting extremely low effort content (a pair of their own posts every waking hour from "6 months and 5 minutes ago", off-topic wikipedia nearly once a day, "I have 60000+ points but only upload from thealtantic/guardian/nytimes") then I go on an irate ten-minute flagging binge.

I've also been aghast at the nerve of those same serial posters applying the letter of the law against other users. I genuinely wouldn't care if Bartosz Ciechanowski only self-promotes every last one of his own posts. Some users are significantly more interesting than others, whether or not they violate the site guidelines marginally on a technicality.

I have suspected it's possible some users flags are worth more than others, and I wouldn't be surprised if my flagging ability was silently removed several years ago.

[dang]

> In private conversation with you, you have confirmed that if I flag/vouch stuff you mods don’t agree with, I get the privilege taken away, even if I genuinely believe a post to fall outside of the guidelines.

People love to make vague claims like this based on things we supposedly said. How about you quote what exactly what I literally said so readers can make up their own minds?

Sorry if that is testy (well, it is testy), but I can't count the number of times that disgruntled users have posted falsely to HN threads to vent their residual frustrations with the mods.

[sph]

Sure, quoting select passages over multiple emails with you personally.

> I'm afraid we took vouching privileges away from your account because you vouched for too many comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines

> If you want to build up a track record for a while of vouching for good comments only, and then email so we can look at the recent vouches

Wondering how does one tell what is ‘good’ in your mind:

> Btw if you're unsure about a case you can always check with us about it. I know the borderline cases are not always easy to call.

—-

In other words, do as dang himself would do, or get penalised. I am not in the business of mind reading.

This was years ago. I am pretty sure lately I have been flagging/vouching stuff I genuinely believe were OK, though you have all the data in front to smite me with “ah, but on this day you vouched this bad comment! Gotcha!” so in the end it’s always a losing battle.

In any case, my issue is with you saying, I quote, ”users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN”. Emphasis mine. No. It is more nuanced than that.

[dang]

Kudos to you for responding exactly as I asked! That is rare to begin with, and more so when I'm being irritable. Big respect.

I can see how using the word "good" was confusing, but I just meant the opposite of "comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines". It just boils down to: what fits the guidelines or not.

> Wondering how does one tell what is ‘good’ in your mind

Since you can't read my mind (at least I assume you can't, and if you could you wouldn't have this question), that's not doable. What you can do is assess things according to your own reading of the site guidelines. If you assimilate https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and evaluate comments based on that and not just on what you like/dislike, then I imagine you won't end up too far from where the mods are, because that's what we're also trying to do.

I'm sure there will always be individual cases where we disagree—even tomhow and I disagree on individual cases—but they should be a minority.

If there are specific cases where you think we got it wrong, I'd be interested to see links, and we're always willing to hear a contrary argument.

[hypfer]

Completely meta and possibly out-of-place, but this thread was I think my first encounter with dang (the human), and, based on it, I'm filled with respect for him.

Good job being you. Please continue doing so.

[sph]

I have had plenty of disagreements with dang over my time on this site, yet I am the first to claim he has been instrumental in making HN as good as it is, notwithstanding the deluge of posts, bots, trolls, and other ungovernable people.

I have a lot of respect for his work.

[Nition]

I can honestly say I've never seen a moderator on any forum as good as Dang. I wish I had!

[abustamam]

As opposed to dang the robot? :)

[sph]

> what fits the guidelines or not

It is no coincidence lawyering is a lucrative career, even when (in most countries) it is simply about interpreting what’s written in the big book.

Until you rewrite the guidelines in an unambiguous programming language (Lisp will do), and provide a system to discern whether a comment falls afoul of them, your personal interpretation of the Word will often differ from someone else’s.

That said, thanks for the edifying discussion.

[fireflash38]

I think you'll find as soon as you codify something strict, people will do their absolute best to work around those rules in any way possible.

[IanCal]

How were you penalised? Was it just losing the ability to flag?

If however you see things isn’t lining up well with how they want things flagged, it makes sense to remove that from you. Unless there’s more punishment attached this seems very sensible regardless of how genuinely you believe in things.

[Aachen]

(Not OP.) I can understand that it feels like a punishment though, if you are legitimately trying to help and this is the thanks you get. It's not just a human-to-human notice, but a change of your permission level; you're being stepped down. Of course I have no idea about this specific case and what the user flagged/vouched, and I can see your logic, just that I'd probably also feel bad if it happened to me and the wording seems fitting enough to me

[bellowsgulch]

Dan likes some people and you ain't in the group, buddy.

[dang]

I like people who follow the site guidelines and want to use HN as intended. That doesn't mean I dislike people who don't, but that side of the moon is more...nuanced.

[Barbing]

He has no idea who I am.

Privately, when I was new he was polite and helpful. (Tried to be polite, was returned.)

/singular anecdote for reader reference

[causality0]

What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN

If this is true then this statement should be added to the guidelines. Many a time I've seen a submission and thought "My god, this is the most moronic thing I've ever read in my life, nearly every single factual claim in this is wrong" but I don't flag it because "don't post utter drivel" is not in the guidelines.

[dang]

What did you think flagging was for? (Genuine question)

It's true that we don't spell things out precisely, but that's because it's impossible to spell things out fully precisely. If you start, where do you stop?

[causality0]

To flag things for removal that the powers that be, aka you, don't want on HN, as defined by the Guidelines. What I want on HN and what you want on HN aren't the same, so users like me have to go by the Guidelines on what is and isn't flaggable. For example, some types of submissions I utterly despise but don't violate the guidelines include "product launches that lie about being the first/only way to do something when this tool already exists", "obvious bullshit like a ten year old curing cancer", "this month's revolutionary new battery technology, ignore the fact it has so little real application we aren't even patenting it", and the classic "here is a five page article examining a question whose answer is not only incredibly obvious but can be answered in a single sentence".

I'd be overjoyed if you told us you wanted us to flag that stuff.

[frm88]

What did you think flagging was for? (Genuine question)

Same as on other sites: Spam and/or bot, abuse and/or insults and other ad hominems and particularly the point in the guidelines where you go: Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. and Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Not that my flagging amounts to anything, there's so much domestic US politics articles from mainstream media on here that I often wonder whether I misunderstand the guidelines, but then, I'm just an Europoor /s

[haunter]

> users should flag articles that they think break the site guidelines

I'm more and more think that link actually hurts the site more than helps. It's a gotcha against everything, can be used a sword and a shield too.

See the part about politics. There is more and more US domestic politics post here (which I actually flag all the time) yet when the topic comes up people will say: "should hackers turn their back on when the world burns" So basically everything goes as long as it fits the narrative.

And the worst offender imo is the last part about reddit. Because I do _really agree_ that HN is more and more like reddit, if not already is. This very post with the comments where everyone is asking for a downvote button is a perfect example of that.

[bellowsgulch]

Generally speaking, HN seems to have more of a problem now of people just drive-by downvoting things because they don't like someone's opinion.

I know you hate the supposedly "noob" comment, as you've put it over the years, and as it is written in the guidelines, that HN is or isn't turning into Reddit, but this aspect of HN makes it indistinguishable to me as a long-time reader here whether you accept it from your perspective as a long-time moderator or not.

Because HN moderation allows people to downvote or flag things simply because they don't like something, it will always be like Reddit. There is no distinguishing feature to separate it otherwise.

One thing that would, would be forcing users to say why they downvoted or flagged something.

Edit: If you spend years saying "no, no, it isn't true" to people, you're just sticking your fingers in your ears. Where there's smoke, there's fire.

[Aachen]

Yeah, even if this is very hard to get it perfect, I keep thinking there has to exist a better voting system than what we have. We can do a presumed step in the right direction and evaluate.

- To give an outlet for (dis)agreement: We could have two arrows on each post, one for agree/disagree, the other for 'legitimate post that helps the conversation'. Someone posting wrong info rarely helps the conversation, but also often enough it's an opinion matter and you can disagree while leaving the latter arrow alone. The latter determines sort order (most helpful first); the former is displayed as a fun fact on posts that are deemed helpful (author sees exact counts just like now)

- A system that seems to work better: A local tech site uses a system where you assign a quality level to a post. The short labels are (translated) "flamebait", "irrelevant but well-intentioned", "relevant but well-known", "useful contribution", and "exceptionally useful". Each one has a numerical value, ranging from -1 to +3, and it'll take the median of all votes (with a half-vote bias towards +1 I think, but that's an implementation detail). If your median comes out to -1, it's collapsed by default; at +2 and +3, it gets highlighted. Incorporating opinion into your quality assessment is a problem here, too, but then you might get +0 instead of +1 and not (like on HN) a score of -7. Not just does that feel a lot more fair, the system and its UI also just makes more clear to everyone that you're supposed to objectively score the comments on the mentioned guidelines (it shows a description every time you hover over a vote option)

[DANmode]

It’s not necessarily that it isn’t true - the most common problem voters have is that it just isn’t interesting or unique.

[bellowsgulch]

Most comments aren't interesting.

[DANmode]

Then you’re in the wrong place (community, thread, or what have you).

Said another way: I couldn’t disagree more.

[bellowsgulch]

I'm not trying to be edgy or intentionally controversial or something, it's just life. Most things people have to say are not interesting. Not everything written on HN can be exceptional, because by definition it wouldn't be the exception.

Your comment right now, and mine above are not interesting!

In another thread there might be one whole comment out of hundreds that retells the experience of a senior engineer working on an uncommon problem, sharing specifics about a particular industry, piece of intellectual property, or another individual.

The rest will not be interesting. That's normal! That's OK! But most are not.

[latexr]

> Not everything written on HN can be exceptional, because by definition it wouldn't be the exception.

I’m not arguing every comment on HN is exceptional, but that logic isn’t sound because exceptionalism is relative (as you alluded to).

In other words, it’s congruent that every comment on some website could be exceptional when compared to the internet at large.

[DANmode]

They’re interesting to me, (or I wouldn’t be spending time on them), and they’re interesting because I expect to care about this specific community behind this specific domain in five or ten, same as I did five or ten ago.

You may be more ephemeral with your community identities. That’s cool, too.

[bluefirebrand]

Don't you need a certain number of upvotes on your account before you can even use the downvote button? I seem to remember that being a thing, has it changed?

The fact you can't just make an account, log in and start downvoting is already a massive improvement over Reddit

[another-dave]

This post from awhile back suggests it's at 501 karma - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437

[abustamam]

To add to this, it does make me think what the difference between down vote and flag is. I mean down vote is obviously the numerical opposite of upvote but why else would people downvote if it not be inappropriate for the forum? (Other than the obvious "I dont like this commenter/their opinion")

Just thinking out loud I suppose.