Hilarious that the original article was flagged off the front page, but this one isn't...
I find it very disheartening that the negative voices are being given so much weight. Everything that's worth doing will have detractors, and when it's something really worth doing it will have vocal detractors. Back when I had comments on my blog, every article I wrote that was any good had at least one person commenting that I was a moron or some equivalent statement.
Great things arouse passion - on both sides.
Giving 10x the power to the people on the negative side just creates an environment where new ideas are discouraged, where important but difficult discourse is pushed aside, where things of true import are penalised out of the group's attention by a few detractors.
There does need to be a system for flagging and removing spam articles, but if this system can (as it plainly regularly is) be co-opted to remove articles from sight just based on not liking them much, then it is broken. The people who have flagging powers are not responsible enough to use them wisely, perhaps.
I see at least one simple solution: lift the flagging privileges so it only becomes available to a much smaller segment of the population. Perhaps making the limit 10'000 instead of 500 would do that. That would still include hundreds of people, based on a quick extrapolation from https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders ). An even better model would be to make it dynamic - perhaps the top 200 commenters...
We don't let users abuse flagging. We have software that identifies users who flag excessive numbers of stories, and we take away their ability to flag.
Is the option visibly removed, or are the 'flags' silently ignored? When I post something I try go through a few pages of 'newest' and flag spam, but this makes me worry I'm wasting my time.
Just an FYI, but accidental flagging happens to me all the time on my iphone, would be nice to have a flag-confirm on mobile (I'd bet mobile flagging correlates much worse with controversy if others are having that problem too)
Company driven sabotage does not require excessive flagging, it requires a number of real-world accounts usually used in a correct way that are one-spot abused to avoid that the weakness of their product stays in the home page for too much time.
Yeah, I figure I'd probably get it back pretty easily if I asked Paul and apologised - but I really don't miss the "opportunity to be negative". So long as he's happy that there are sufficient people down-flagging the stuff that requires down-flagging, the site will happily exist without _my_ opinions of what's worthwhile and what isn't.
Apparently I was caught by that, yet I don't believe I flagged an excessive number of stories. I seldom used the flag at all unless it was for egregiously political or lightweight stories on the front page, or for spam comments a few years ago.
I doubt I used more than double-digit flags in the 6+ years I've been here.
I mentioned that I flag pretty much all of the climate change stories, and got my flag powers revoked. C'est la vie, I guess. I still don't think those stories add anything to this site besides some of the same old tired flame wars, so I'd probably continue flagging those and politics if I got the flag link back.
I'm sorry if this is blunt but in my opinion it is good that your flagging rights were removed. For every person who personally doesn't like climate change stories, there is a person who doesn't like Ruby on Rails stories, a person who doesn't like patent stories, a person who doesn't like NSA stories, and another person who doesn't like Node.js stories. Because flagging has such a strong effect on ranking, it should be reserved for highly inappropriate posts. With great power comes great responsibility.
Hardly any of the climate change stories are "interesting", but basically just "LOOK SEE I AM RIGHT IN MY BELIEFS AND THIS PROVES IT" sorts of articles. Those are poisonous to a site like this - they just beget a lot of useless discussion without much substance in it.
In other words, they are, IMO, highly inappropriate posts, not just stuff I happen to find uninteresting or don't like.
Climate change articles may not be interesting to you, but they are interesting to plenty of people. Might it just be your already formed belief that they are uninteresting that makes you find most of the climate change articles uninteresting? The comment you wrote here could equally well have been written by a person who is flagging any of the other categories I mentioned. The rules say:
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Climate change definitely fits that description. Lets search for climate change: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=climat... None of those articles look any more inappropriate for HN to me, compared to what you'd find for any of the other categories I mentioned.
If you think a comment in a discussion is inappropriate, you shouldn't flag the story, you should flag the comment.
Do you really think most of those climate change articles are being posted by people who find them "intellectually gratifying"? I think most of them are pointing to stuff they think supports their own point of view, and they wish to share as widely as possible with the world.
How many articles are there about uncontroversial, but interesting aspects of climate science? Do any of them ever get upvoted, ever?
For instance, in the search that I provided, there are several articles that I find intellectually gratifying, for example "Decoding Climate Change with Perl, gnuplot and Google Earth" and "Climate Change Authority Admits Mistake" from the MIT technology review and "Nasa.gov: Evidence of Climate Change". Do you think these articles are less intellectually gratifying as articles about the NSA or articles discussing the merit or insanity of Node.js? If so, then you are applying a much higher standard to climate change articles than those other articles.
But whether or not YOU should find these articles intellectually gratifying is beside the point. We already have a feature for those kind of articles: don't upvote them. Flagging is not for those kind of stories. Again, if you find a discussion inappropriate, flag the comments in the discussion. Anyway, I don't think this discussion is going to be productive any more, so this will be my last comment.
Political stories are off-topic and should not be posted here. Most of the climate change articles seem to me to be pretty much about people's political beliefs, rather than an inherent interest in climate science or meteorology or something. That's why I flagged them. What other sorts of climate science do you find interesting? I find it odd that so many people are so very "intellectually gratified" by stuff that revolves around the very political "climate change" stuff, but don't seem to care too much for other kinds of more mundane science.
I probably would not have flagged the perl/gnuplot one, I'll grant you that one.
Node.js articles are on topic, even if one or the other happens to be boring. So I would not flag them, even the most uninteresting ones.
That sounds like an impressive way to create an echo chamber of opinions. "Looks like what you said isn't what other people believe so you shall be punished!"
Yes, it seems so. If you get caught on the wrong side of some upvote mob you lose. Whatever; this is what the oweners want and it's a silly thing in the grand scheme of things.
PG has said in the past that there is a flamewar detector, and that it suppresses discussions. In the past, this has been triggered on certain Microsoft related articles, which has caused several people to claim that there is some sort of ring of HN users who strategically flag articles about Microsoft off the page (and depending on who you ask, they also vote up Google articles). Ironically, it seems that at least some of the people making these claims were sock-puppeting themselves.
Votes made from an article's direct link (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854) don't count towards its rank and too many of them will set of the voting ring detector (this is why it's a bad idea to link directly to a HN submission from your blog or from Twitter/Facebook). This is probably what happened here.
Wait...what?
I am not suppose to upvote from the article page but the main pages? I know I'm new here, but I find that counter-intuitive and disappointing that I've been doing wrong.
Wouldn't it make sense to remove the upvote option on the article page, surely I'm not the only one who got this wrong (I hope).
I think it's based on referrer, not where you actually do the upvote.
I.e. if you get to the article page from the main page, then that's fine. But if you arrive there with no referrer or from somewhere else, then it isn't counted, since quite possibly someone sent you the specific article just to upvote it.
On the topic of flamewars causing removal of articles, the difficulty, IMO, is that an entry on HN is composed of both an article and comments. Flamewars have terrible comment quality, so even if the article is upvote-worthy, it can mean the spot on HN is better occupied by something with a less interesting story but better comments.
As to flagging, I think a bigger problem is activism-upvoting, in other words upvoting so others see a story and not because it's interesting.
If you don't trust the average user with flagging powers because of how they affect the front page, why do you trust them to upvote good articles onto the front page? Clearly only select users should be able to upvote articles.
I think it's also funny that some people are under the delusion that sites like this and reddit, are actually controlled by the 'voters', and that everyone has the same power.
They're not. They're controlled by editors who will place items where they want to.
For me, the worst part of hacker news is the silent banning if you are critical of any YC funded startup. Censorship is ugly, but it happens routinely.
It pulls https://www.hnsearch.com/bigrss and re-sorts it with the basic formula (but without penalties). If people like it/return to it I'll clean up the UI for better readability/mobile use (and display comments there instead of linking back to HN).
EDIT: Interestingly, without penalties it looks like this thread would no longer be on the front page.
FOLLOW-UP: My note in the edit was due to a mistake in the implementation, kindly pointed out by OP via email. It is now fixed, and this thread appears in roughly the same place on both sites (there is some lag between the RSS feed that I use as my source and HN proper, so I wouldn't expect an exact match even if I did no re-ranking at all). It is, however, easy and interesting to spot which articles have been penalized; there's an NSA article at the bottom of the front page right now that's at the top of my penalty-free page.
I'll be modifying my page to highlight penalized items and calculate their penalty when I have a bit of time.
Thanks, very nice. How do you get story point scores from the RSS feed? The last time I looked at it, it was missing that crucial bit of information, and I don't see it now either. Or are you using parsing or another data source to get at them?
I tend to flag any article that is about analyzing, optimizing, or gaming Hacker News.
It's just a website for people to talk to each other and share links. Trying to out-think the algorithms is, to me, a smell for cynical PR or at best misplaced priorities.
I've often wondered about the possibility of gaming HN through it's participants. For example, pre-emptively down-voting yourself from a second account early on in a busy article, possibly with a reply using that second account noting you don't know why anyone would feel the need to down-vote that...
I find it very disheartening that the negative voices are being given so much weight. Everything that's worth doing will have detractors, and when it's something really worth doing it will have vocal detractors. Back when I had comments on my blog, every article I wrote that was any good had at least one person commenting that I was a moron or some equivalent statement.
Great things arouse passion - on both sides.
Giving 10x the power to the people on the negative side just creates an environment where new ideas are discouraged, where important but difficult discourse is pushed aside, where things of true import are penalised out of the group's attention by a few detractors.
There does need to be a system for flagging and removing spam articles, but if this system can (as it plainly regularly is) be co-opted to remove articles from sight just based on not liking them much, then it is broken. The people who have flagging powers are not responsible enough to use them wisely, perhaps.
I see at least one simple solution: lift the flagging privileges so it only becomes available to a much smaller segment of the population. Perhaps making the limit 10'000 instead of 500 would do that. That would still include hundreds of people, based on a quick extrapolation from https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders ). An even better model would be to make it dynamic - perhaps the top 200 commenters...