Sometimes things I post get flagged by users and I get it, fair enough. This time I can only think of malicious reasons.
The only people who I can imagine flagging this post are Meta PR, or users who are bringing their politics into a non-political post. If anyone has any other reasonable explanations, I would love to hear them.
Looks like the title was edited, original title: Facebook Is Censoring 404 Media Stories About Facebook's Censorship
I didn't see any such pattern in the data. It was flagged by quite a few users, none of whom showed any obvious pattern like affiliation with a company or a political slant. (Edit: I mean none of the ones I looked at. There were too many to look at them all.)
We can only guess why users flag things. In this case, I don't have a good guess, other than that the article title is baity, so I replaced it with more neutral language from the subtitle, and (partly) rolled back the flags.
The flaggers may be correct, in any case, because this thread is noticeably terrible.
I'm sure you've considered this feature, but since flagging is such a heavyweight (in terms of ranking impact) activity, shouldn't a flagger need to at least articulate (via text or a drop-down menu) why they are flagging it? Even vague choices like "Site guideline violation," "Spam," "Astroturfing," "Political flame bait" might offer some of the missing insight.
Mainly the bureaucratic nature of it. Preserving HN's minimalism has been a priority because it's the kind of thing that's so easily lost; like a frog boiling itself.
Yea, I get the hesitance to invest in this. Nobody is going to select/admit reasons like "Because flagging is a mega-downvote and I don't like this story getting attention," even if it's the real reason. We don't know how accurate or actionable Slashdot's drop-down choice moderation was, either. Even if people are honest about their intentions, what is actionable? Not much I guess.
I'm surprised you'd think that - Facebook moderation changes and the same tired back and forth about 'free speech' have been some of the worst threads for me.
I can usually power through the RSS feed pretty quickly. My reader shows only titles, so I swipe on a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem relevant. I can then take my time with the good stuff.
Indeed. Some of the most interesting stories on HN never make it past the initial filter. I've seen great posts slip by in obscurity only to get hundreds of votes and hit the front page weeks or months later. There's a lot indeterminism in what makes it to the front page(s) and what doesn't.
I was cheekily implying that the well paid Facebook developers flagged this article as it forces them to confront the issue that their employer is generally a bad actor, and their employment contributes to that.
Hardly a new take but I think this being flagged so quickly is a concerning problem.
I'll confess to taking it personally; apparently I still need to work on that!
Don't know if you saw my other post about this, but the flagging behavior looked normal to me. I didn't see any patterns in the flagging history of those users, such as flagging posts about FB or some political position.
