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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Good job being you. Please continue doing so.

I have a lot of respect for his work.

To think that someone has multiple / repeated disagreements with Dang is wild to me.

In my history on this site, I have not once seen Dang say or do anything that’s not in the best interest of the community.

He’s possibly one of the least controversial moderators I have ever encountered online.

I mean it's kinda hard to kick out the VC brainrot get-rich-quick sanity-is-tertiary scum when you're literally housed under a ycombinator subdomain, but that is technically also a choice that people might see as controversial.

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.

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.

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

/singular anecdote for reader reference

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

- 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)

Said another way: I couldn’t disagree more.

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.

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

Just thinking out loud I suppose.

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