| > Where did you gather this from, since you aren't banned from flagging? In addition to this just being common knowledge, I had a HN account prior to this one that I retired when I decided that I wanted to have an account nominally connected to my external identity (it was not hellbanned). This account had it's flagging privileges revoked after I flagged a handful of Steve Jobs death stories. > Also, since you seem to be quite knowledgeable about HN's system, instead of just "disagreeing", could you enlighten us a few few ways other than flagging that all those posts in the screenshots are ranked lower than other older posts with less points? I have no inside knowledge into this, however it is my suspicion that vote velocity and comment section quality are factored into rank. This would explain how highly controversial stories that undoubtedly had excessive flagging (I am thinking specifically of several of the "gender politics" themed stories we have had here in the past) have often managed to hang onto the top spot for unusual amounts of time. They had many high-quality comments. Frankly the points and number of comments on those allegedly "flagged to death" Microsoft articles are pretty low. I can easily see small differences in voting velocity and comment quality accounting for the slightly lower rank on the page. Is it possible that flagging is causing the phenomenon that you are seeing? Sure, it might be that. But I do not think that it is the only plausible explanation (or even the most plausible.) If PG chimed in on this, there would be no reason to speculate. |
Adding more data for perusal. HN rankings charts show abnormal behavior too, because all the complaining led to more upvotes or it would've fallen off the front page.
http://hnrankings.info/5715168/
http://hnrankings.info/5715889/
Will post more screenshots of downranked submissions tomorrow, maybe we can figure out exactly what's happening.