Surely it makes no difference: if you flag too much and you're ignored, you have no effect; if you don't flag, you have no effect.

Why not go on flagging? You might be having an effect.

Because I feel like a chump, not knowing if my flag effort counts or is being secretly ignored. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just doesn't feel like it's in the spirit (or what I perceive as the spirit) of the site to trick me like that.

I'm not sure if I'd want to know my flags are being ignored. I know I was pretty disappointed to lose my downvote ability a few weeks ago (I was one of the 200-500 karma notch babies). Knowing that I'd lost an unearned flag ability might be even worse. On the other hand, if I knew, I wouldn't bother with the noobstories page anymore.

I hear what you're saying, and as someone who has been on this site for about two years and still treated as a sandboxed user, there are times where I wonder "why bother flagging" when there is no feedback provided to show me my affect on the system.

Then I take a breath, close the browser tab, get back to work and realize that I care too much at that moment about something very low on the totem pole that isn't going to increase my effective output for the day.

We can't have it both ways, unfortunately. The more transparent the voting and flagging mechanisms are on the site the more likely they are to be gamed. I'm ok with just 'doing' and not worrying how much of an effect it has on the site.

That will probably not be any problem, since you're flagging stories that lots of others flag as well. It probably works by checking if you flag completely different from 'most' people.

Yeah, but I also flag stuff that I don't like but others do (judging by their eventual front page status), such as some of the recent TSA and Wikileaks submissions. I flag social media stuff from time to time if it doesn't seem very technical. I even admit to sometimes flagging submissions without reading the linked content.

No, the safe move is to assume that pg is doing as good a job as he can to make the rules line up with the collective behavior he wants to see. If you systematically flag every story by an established user whose comment you just downvoted, that would probably trigger a reduction in the weight of your flags. However if you flag lots of spam, and it really is spam, that's good. Please keep doing it.

(And by the way, thank you.)