I presume those articles were killed due to not wanting to feed the attention troll. Killing content-free controversy is a good feature of the non-democratic moderation - yellow journalism is designed to draw users in and make them passionately care about superficialities. Preventing further comments on a deadened article does really suck, but given the development status of the server, thats the breaks (btw, is HN actually still running on mzscheme-372, or is there a better implementation of Arc these days?). I've had showdead on for a while, and the sheer majority of dead comments are spam, one-liners, and duplicates (when you submit the same comment twice, the second one is automatically deadened). Occasionally I will see someone who's been hellbanned for a few marginal comments and it's clear that they're still trying to contribute - those are the real travesties.
Then perhaps submissions need downvote buttons- because what you are describing is not what the "flag" button is for. I don't like the idea that a group of users are deciding what is "superficial" for me- if I'd arrived on HN an hour later than I did, I would never have seen the GeekList post and been able to make up my own mind.
AFAIK, Flag is for spam or something that is soooo OT that it should have been submitted to Reddit because it doesn't fit here from any intellectual or technical point of view (say, general politics). In all my time, I've used Flag maybe once -- and it was for spam. Using it as an Editor for something that is otherwise of interest is abuse, in my own opinion.
Actually that's precisely what flagging is for - getting a human moderator to look at the story and decide whether it is worthwhile. Information transmission and copying are easy, filtering and management are hard. There are a billion things going on in the world right now. What interesting stories didn't get HN exposure because someone else seized the moment for 15 minutes of twitter-fame?
Actually that's precisely what flagging is for - getting a human moderator to look at the story
Do you know that is what happens? Because I don't think it does. I imagine an algorithm is applied that weighs votes/views against flags and acts accordingly- I haven't seen anything suggesting that a human moderator is involved here.
I know for a fact that duplicate comments, hellbanned accounts, and banned domain names are automatically killed on submission. I'm pretty sure I've seen comments after a popular story being killed where a moderator is saying why they killed it. Whether the algorithmic methods apply to popular stories I've no idea, but front-page killings aren't frequent enough that an automated method would be desirable. I also figure there are a bunch of early-YC users with adminlike powers. Once you have a financial partnership with someone, trusting them with elevated privileges on a tangential news board is small change (for example, YC startups can post clearly unreviewed job ads).
I don't doubt that yc.starups can post job ads without a middleman. But what about the content makes it clear they were not reviewed? Profanity? Nudity? Ugly kitten clip art?
What are the tell tale refinements that demonstrate a job ads has been reviewed?
Maybe around several months ago there were a few right in a row that were clearly written without thought to how they'd be perceived (sorry, I don't remember actual details and it doesn't look like they're archived). Nothing outright offensive, just immature sounding. Think 'brogrammer' but less deliberate.
There are sites that are automagically banned by software and those are made Dead as soon as they are submitted. And the HN community itself does a very good job of selecting what's worthwhile by UP voting -- not by flagging.
Edited this post after I learned Mindsight has actually been here twice as long as I have! Oops.
This is exactly what happens on a daily basis. If you post something that is against the beliefs of the masses of HN (even when it's not a troll), you will get flagged and down voted.
The result will be a homogeneous community. I know I will leave eventually because of this. The same thing has happened to the main Reddit.
As far as I can tell, when people complain about being downvoted for expressing an unpopular view, that's usually not what happened. Usually it's that their comment was rude. Occasionally it was just mediocre. Most of the time their position per se wasn't particularly unpopular.
What one ought to do is take one's lumps like everybody else and figure out how to make better comments. The worst thing to do is complain about it. That is guaranteed to earn downvotes, as it should on any site optimizing for signal/noise ratio.
Genuinely unconventional or unpopular comments tend to get downvoted by some and upvoted by others until they come out close to even. The reason for this is that many users, me included, make a point of giving a compensating upvote to posts they feel were treated unfairly, irrespective of whether they agree. Only posts with negative votes attract this kind of fixup, so they end up about even. A corollary is that if your comment stays downvoted, odds are that a fair-minded jury of your peers found it to be rude or be poorly expressed. Another corollary is that genuinely unconventional comments are often easy to overlook, because they're indistinguishable (in rank) from bland ones.
The conclusions are: when downvoted, resist complaining; ask yourself how your comment was rude or could have been better expressed; and when certain that everyone else is wrong, bite your tongue anyway. Just remember what they say about wasting your time and irritating the pig.
