Remove Flagging

Question

Flagging, while it was initially added with good intentions years ago, is now a form of censorship on HN.Content doesn't need to be managed in this way because worthwhile stories are upvoted accordingly regardless of the topic; stories that are not worthwhile/relevant are not upvoted and vanish on their own lack of merit.Flagging is used by people to silence important discussion more than anything else now.The truth is twice as hard to move as a lie and flagging is another tool used by those that want to subvert the meaning of facts, and undermine democracy/freedom at a core level.HN mods should have the ability to flag still but I woudl argue it should rarely be used.Case in point: this post will likely be flagged by those that want to continue abusing the flag capability of HN and silence this discussion.

akersten · Accepted Answer

Tell HN: Keep flagging. It's critically important for us to be able to collectively remove low quality discourse, submissions that violate the HN community guidelines, and outright spam. If you notice that your submissions in particular are consistently flagged, consider that the problem is not with the larger community.

cousin_it · Answer

In theory HN already has the perfect implementation of this: you can turn on "showdead" in your profile settings, then flagged posts should become visible to you on the frontpage (as long as they are highly upvoted like the rest). This approach solves the problem for those who dislike flagging, without inconveniencing those who like flagging. But I'm not sure it actually works, can someone check?

LinuxBender · Answer

I've watched the "dead" and flagged submissions and from what I have seen it has mostly been advertisements, political blogs, sites that invoke emotional response. Can you summarize examples of other content types that were flagged, without linking to the content that was flagged?

jgrahamc · Answer

Flagging is used by people to silence important discussion more than anything else nowWhere's the evidence of this?