Re:Poll: Are there too many NSA stories on HN, or not enough?
by timr on Wednesday September 11, 2013 @05:22PM
(#6370227)
HN has had a long-thread penalty (since well before the NSA scandal) to prevent flamewars from taking over. That's probably what's happening here.
Re:Poll: Are there too many NSA stories on HN, or not enough?
by sinak2 on Wednesday September 11, 2013 @05:36PM
(#6370299)
91 comments doesn't seem like that many, but that's definitely a possibility.
Re:Poll: Are there too many NSA stories on HN, or not enough?
by timr on Wednesday September 11, 2013 @05:37PM
(#6370301)
I think there's a rate calculation. It wouldn't make sense to just arbitrarily penalize long threads. It's postings per unit time or somesuch.
Certainly some of the discussion on other threads should be filtered. But the moderation on stories themselves appears to be heavy-handed right now. Many significant new stories aren't making it to the home page (see above).
A proposed solution: If the reason for this in fact flagging, and not moderation by admins, then perhaps showing the guidelines and possibly requiring users to give a reason for flagging might reduce the number of wayward flags. The official guidelines for flagging are: "If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link"