HACKER Q&A
📣 hjoldic

Guard against users who misuse flag/report on posts


In the last few days I have seen a number of posts become flagged for no clear reason. I don't want to get into the detail of what the topic of those posts was to avoid derailing the conversation, but in my opinion they were absolutely in line with what people here would be interested in.

So, this would be my suggestion:

1. Instead of submitting a post, a user can request to get it preemptively approved by mods to prevent it from being flagged

This can take some time, so one downside would be that there would be a delay between the request and the post being visible in the forum

2. If approved, the post stays up no matter what - users can brigade and flag all day long, but the post was already cleared

3. If not approved, the post goes through the normal cycle

Does anyone have a better suggestion to reduce the negative effects of users who misuse the flag/report functionality?

  👤 bell-cot Accepted Answer ✓
My sense is that HN's benevolent dictators really prefer to avoid anything as heavy-handed as your suggestions. If enough users here just don't want certain topics in their HN experience, then posts on those topics will get flagged.

HN is not the whole internet. If you have strong feelings about the current NCAA football rankings, or stupid policies of NYC's Dept. of Homeless Services, or the horrible ethical issues raised by Scorsese's new movie Killers of the Flower Moon - there are a zillion other sites where you can raise and discuss those.

And if the managers or users on those other sites are quick to flag and ban posts about the relative merits of MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, or awesome CSS tricks - that's okay, too.

👤 quickthrower2
HN mods don’t have that much capacity. You would need a team of approvers. And it would be a boring job!

Instead just internally sticky note people who flag something that is later vouched or vice versa. Then review these noted people and shadow ban their vouch/flag powers if they are making a lot of off decisions.

I reckon an algo like this would catch a person a day and would be easy to review. This reduces trolls.

(BTW: If your submission is fine and gets flagged your other remedy is to submit again a day later.)

👤 brudgers
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