> edit: I can't imagine why this is flagged.

Flagging seems to be one of the big vulnerabilities of HN.

Maybe flaggers should be required to state the reason for flagging, and this reason should be exposed.

Flagging means "no one should even see this on HN", and random people shouldn't get arrogant or cavalier about swinging around that power.

I have my account set to show flagged comments. A lot of flagged comments are simply some form of "wrongthink" but not violating any guidelines. So I've used the function often to "save" a flagged thing but it seemed to have stopped working for me at some point. I can only speculate why, but I think I saw some other commenters saying that happens if you unflag too much.. wrongthink. I want to give the site admin the benefit of the doubt though. Maybe it's simply an automated process that notices you unflagged too many things that were flagged by others too much?

I also have that setting, and occasionally vouch for an inexplicably flagged comment I notice.

There's definitely wrongthink/ideological flagging and downvoting going on.

(On some comments I make, I know when I make it that it's going to get downvoted, because it pushes against an opinion of the kinds of people who will downvote to suppress criticism. It used to be that criticizing cryptocurrency would get downvotes, but now it's popular to criticize. I can get reliably downvoted any time that I suggest that raising the fee for some basic public infrastructure, in a "market-based" way, is a handout of the public infrastructure to the wealthy. Also, suggestions that there's still any bias against women, in anything, somewhere, seems to reliably get downvotes, no matter how relevant; I don't know why, but I'd guess it's because the topic has a lot of general angry sentiment, and people who are angry the other direction aren't represented as much on HN.)

I'd distinguish wrongthink from something being off-topic and done-to-death or a flamewar magnet. Maybe one mental exercise test for this is whether the same person would also still downvote as "topic" if the opinion of the post/comment were flipped.

one common misconception is that "the downvote is not a disagree button". it absolutely is. I made that mistake before, in the early days of reddit they used to stress that mantra, and I made the false assumption it was true here. You are getting downvoted because people disagree or don't like what you have to say. simple as that.

Downvotes sadly are endorsed by pg (the owner of HN) for use to indicate disagreement.

Flags are not downvotes and are not to show disagreement. They do seem to get used that way.

I like the others above have show-flagged enabled. "90%" of things I vouch are things I disagree with that represent what I consider a point of view that deserves to be known, has been at least reasonably well presented, and isn't flame-bait.

>There's definitely wrongthink/ideological flagging and downvoting going on.

I actually vouch for a lot of comments I disagree with that was flagged, and upvoted it because I want it to be shown to the world. And in other times I disagree with it but vouch and upvoted because I dont want HN discussions to be one sided.

Throwaway here.

I’ve lived in China for a few years and I noticed anytime I write anything even remotely positive about my experience there I will get downvoted or flagged. Even completely neutral comments sometimes gets downvoted.

I don’t think anyone doubts there are good things that come from China. Using a throwaway account won’t help your cause marketing China. Like every other “superpower” China has their major, major flaws. The kicker is trust. Pro-China rhetoric on a highly-moderated forum should be met with skepticism.

This isn’t opinion. The great firewall of China isn’t a farce, it would be good to remember that.

So because there are bad things in China nobody can say anything that's not negative about China? Or how do you see things?

It sounds more like the concern is that a post coming from China has a significantly higher likelihood to be state-sponsored propaganda than a resident’s/citizen’s genuine opinion. It makes sense on its face that it would be “higher” (that’s the point about the Great Firewall) but it seems to be a matter of personal opinion how “significant” that increase is.

> won’t help your cause marketing China

by what means did you determine that was his cause?

Russian here. I can't show -any- cool tech made here or an optimization that we do that western countries don't because people would say I praise Russia no matter how much more often and harsher I criticize. They don't even know what I think about the country, I just can't speak about it.

I appreciate people who are saving flagged comments because what made HN great 10-15 years ago was that I often changed my views because people would articulate why they are right and they sometimes indeed were.

silencing the opposition creates an illusion of consensus. in the deluded minds of the terminally online, it is paramount to maintain that illusion.

in every remotely political discussion here, reddit opinions are allowed to be expressed as non-constructively as you please, but all dissent, no matter how factual and constructive, gets flagged within minutes.

Apparently it's because the original headline had the unfortunate juxtaposition of "homelessness" & "experimentation"?

I wouldn't be so quick to call delusion/dissent when designers of our spaces have simply made it far too easy to turn private affects into public effects..

(& It might be rude of me to be so concrete.. so.. apologies)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44213954

& What if everyone starts camping on pristine beaches? That'd be something! To marvel at!

They're not deluded. They're evil. By faking consensus you mint new converts because the false consensus affects the opinions of everyone new to the subject. The platform designers, moderators, etc, etc, know this and that's why they do it.

ironic that this was flagged an downvoted with no response, ha.

Yeah, that gave me a bit of a laugh too, but the flag seems to be gone now at least!.

Not ironic at all. Downvoting and flagging exist exactly to handle content that is not worth the effort or even harmful to respond to (remember bullshit almost always takes more effort to debunk than to create). As such, it's usually a mistake to both downvote and respond.

You've already described the solution to the problem: we upvote things that we think are unfairly downvoted. If you say mildly controversial things, you can often watch this happen on your comments. Not that I wouldn't like reasons attached to downvotes and flags...

The reason for flagging here is simple: while interesting, this has nothing to do with tech or startups. A laptop was mentioned, but that’s about it.

HN is not strictly about tech or startups. So there is no reason to flag something based solely on the fact that it's not about tech or startups.

Thankfully it's clarified here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

But I think it's best to let the people vote if they value a story on how lifestyle hacking can help you go straight to building startups instead of having to first save up in a job.

That's a page about Show HN, not HN in general. The guidelines for news stories like this one are here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Specifically, I was paraphrasing this part:

> That includes more than hacking and startups.

Also this was not about voting or not voting, but about people flagging the submission.

What HN is or is not about is largely decided by flags (besides more direct moderator invention) so your reasoning is circular. If something is flagged then it's because enough people don't think it belongs here.

Appreciate the feedback!

100%. It's a lot easier when you live next to a Google campus. And it sorts all the menial matters that make a huge difference, like access to washing machines.

About the flagging, you seem to have been here for a while, any hint? I get the word usage can comes across as disrespectful now that people mention it, but didn't think a link would get flagged for that.

I have been here for years. Most things that get flagged are extremely objectionable or touch a political nerve.

I could see conservatives disliking that it questions capitalism's viability post AI. I could see liberals thinking you are making light of folks experiencing homelessness.

I think those are absurd, but with a low vote count, your post may only need a few absurd people to flag you.

Naturally, there could be other reasons things get flagged, but I never see them because they disappear too fast.

You could always ask @dang to weigh in. He might see something which violates the guidelines.

Makes sense. Thanks for sharing!

Looks like it might have to do with the title, or at least the title was changed before it got unflagged. Good learning!

> Most things that get flagged are extremely objectionable

I unflag completely normal posts every day on the "New" page of HN. Many of them are actually very good posts, and some of them reach the number one spot of the front page after being unflagged.

Very rarely do I see the flagged posts being very objectionable.

It was flagged because it originally had a totally different (and inappropriate) title.

I want to be able to upvote this comment just to show everyone how rules like "don't change the headline as originally given by website" or "let randos (with unpredictable emotional structure) flag stuff" lead to suboptimal outcomes

Sure, but any system of rules leads to suboptimal outcomes. Which isn’t to say the devil you know is better than the one you don’t, just that this being a suboptimal outcome is not in itself a reason to change those rules. In that context, the title rule is rather agreeable.

I usually see people complaining about misleading headlines when it does not match the linked article. To be fair, it is sometimes an improvement but the point is that it’s always editorializing. Keeping that to a minimum only when the article’s headline is particularly objectionable seems to be better than letting every poster editorialize as a matter of course.

For these above reasons, I like the "don't editorialize" rule by itself. BUT it seems especially suboptimal in comparison to its combination with the "let people flag stories without justification" rule.

No worries, I got ya, buddy:

Imho instead of eschewing quantification altogether, rules should have a ELO style rating computed from the effects of their pair-wise combinations :)

The hard part could be the combinatorial explosion lol