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Ask HN: How do things get flagged?
7 points by ifyoubuildit on June 27, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 21 comments
I tried to submit a link and it seemed to be immediately flagged.

There is going to be an event on X where a third party candidate will supposedly answer the debate questions in realtime. This seems relevant to HN because of the IP implications (CNN obviously doesn't want anyone taking any eyeballs off of their ads, but do they have any right to stop it?) as well as the technical challenge of pulling it off.



Funny I made a TV show for public access titled "The Real Debate" where I spliced Ralph Nader into a Bush-Gore debate. I had one sequence where I spliced the two mainstream candidates to make them breathlessly advocate militarism and then segue into a discussion of schools. The timing was brilliant for most of it except for the part where Gore says forcefully "IF IT'S A FAILING SCHOOL, SHUT IT DOWN!" at which point a smart bomb was supposed to hit a bunker but because of the weirdness of the S-VHS editor I was using I could never get that synced perfectly with the sound track.

So far as flagging, this is my understanding.

A small number of people need to flag something for it to appear [flagged]. It may be as little as 2 or 3 but it is certainly more than 1. Some people do watch the new queue and flag a lot, other things are likely to get flagged when they get more visibility.

I made a model which could predict the fate of HN submissions and found my model seemed to perform unreasonably well at predicting flagging (a ROC around 0.96 as compared to the 0.72 or so of my "does it get more than 1/2 a comment per vote?" model and the 0.63 of my "does it get more than 10 votes?")

Turned out it was too good to be true because HN automatically kills a lot of submissions that you never see unless you turn on showdead. Some people spam the same headline over and over again hundreds of times and if you don't design your test-train split such that the same headline can never appear on both sides you will get the wrong idea of the performance of the model. (This affected my other models too but not so catastrophically)

The #1 way people get their posts marked [dead] all the time is they keep posting links over and over from their own blog or other site but never post anything else. You can certainly do some self-promotion as a community member of HN but if you're not a participant in the community it's not welcome.


I estimate that the number of flaggers needed is somewhere between 3 and 5 (inclusive).

I have no problem with HN auto-flagging spam posts. It's a service to the community.

By the way, if you see something flagged that shouldn't be, you can "vouch" for it.


Lately I have been running with showdead and occasionally vouching.


If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

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


At a first glance, I'd agree. But as I mentioned, there are interesting technical details here, no?

> Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups

What's more of a hack than working around some of the most powerful institutions in the world?

EDIT: on second thought, I'd be pretty shocked if this were covered on cable news.


there are interesting technical details

There aren't any in the thing you linked. There are interesting technical details in, say, delivering a twitch stream but most twitch streams are not good HN posts.

What's more of a hack than working around some of the most powerful institutions in the world?

That's the 'everything is related to everything somehow' argument but, similarly, you can make it about anything - it just tends to avoid the concrete objections to the thing.


> That's the 'everything is related to everything somehow' argument but, similarly, you can make it about anything - it just tends to avoid the concrete objections to the thing

I'm thinking of this more in the sense of the ycombinator application question:

"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

This could be an example of a tactic for a startup to use against incumbents with enormous advantages, since thats basically what the situation is.


Third party candidates always struggle for coverage and publicity and the criteria you're applying might describe something interesting if it was novel, successful and written in an interesting way. An announcement about streaming debate reactions that's mostly advocacy and a countdown clock isn't evidence of any of these things. If it turns out they are evident, you can conceivably post some writeup about it afterwards that might get better reception as it would fit HN's remit better.


I expect that an article dedicated to interesting technical details will not be flagged.


If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811639, users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I imagine the link seemed too political and sensational to count as on-topic for HN.


The link leads to a blank page. What was the URL submitted?


Switch to 'yes' showdead in your profile.


Just to directly answer your question... logged-in users can flag submissions using the "flag" link under them, or flag comments by clicking on their permalink (the relative timestamp) and then flagging on the new page that opens.

The implication is that probably another user flagged your submission because they considered it off-topic. Generally anything political will immediately get flagged because people here don't like to discuss that.


I'll add the the flagging UX on HN is very broken, and I've seen it brought up before only to get a "won't fix". I have two pages of links I've "flagged" while having never intentionally clicked the flag link myself.

That said, your topic doesn't sound like most people would consider on topic for HN. It shouldn't be flagged, but I'd expect it to be buried.


Users flag them, mostly, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html along with the suggestion to email such questions to hn@ycombinator.com rather than posting them to HN.

Prenouncements for events, most kinds of generic political advocacy are not great HN topics though, which is likely why your post was flagged.


People will flag anything for any reason. Any reference in an article to gender, race or politics, regardless of the technical merits, is guaranteed to get at least a few flags. Articles will get flagged just because of the title, or the domain, or the grammar and tone of the content, or because the formatting used too much whitespace, or because someone decided a story just isn't "HN worthy."

That said, your link doesn't really lead to a substantive article discussing anything of technical or intellectual interest, which is supposed to be the minimal bar for any political submission (although as many people ignore that as abuse flags.) It's essentially an advertisement, which unless you're a YC partner is a guaranteed flag.


The flag is the turbodowndoot button. When a simple downdoot isn't enough for how offensive a post is, you can bring out the big guns. I rarely do it, but be on notice that I'm not afraid to seriously mess up your karma (or whatever it does) if you cross the line with me, pal.


As far as I can tell, flagging does nothing to karma.

But only comments can be downvoted. Posts can't. So for a post, flagging is the only option to say "this doesn't belong on HN".


What are the technical challenges in this case?


Can this be pulled off legally? What can CNN do to stop it?

Can this be done well enough that it's actually compelling for viewers? How? Do they just rebroadcast the stream and put something over it?

Is X mature enough to handle this? (DeSantis tried to do a big event a while back and it was a complete flop if I remember correctly).


To be honest, I don’t feel this is HN material.




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