Ask PG: Can We Have An Honest Discussion Around Abusive Flagging On HN?

the below is a screengrab of http://news.ycombinator.com/news pages 1 - 3 (reformatted for continuous viewing), as of 13:00 EDT on Thursday / 16 May 2013. (highlighting and related commentary added).

i put this together as a high-level and informal analysis of post rank as a function of: time since submission (hours), upvotes (points), and the volume of comments posted. comparisons made relate to the post Google to Microsoft: Remove your YouTube App from the Windows Phone Store https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715168 (shown as highlighted in yellow; near the bottom..)

> http://i.imgur.com/ZCR2hun.jpg

without knowing exactly how rank is determined, the highlighted post’s positioning appears to be significantly depressed relative to where it should be, based on examining similar posts (in terms of time since posting, points, and comments).

it has been mentioned that this irregularity is likely due to said post being atypically ‘flagged’ as spam. i have no data to back this up, but having seen similar behavior before, i believe this to be the case - and it appears to be a fairly common occurrence with posts that present a viewpoint counter to that of the majority. i believe this apparent abuse of the spam ‘flagging’ feature on HN is seriously detrimental to the community.

i think it would be beneficial if we could: (1) get a statement clarifying rules/good practices around ‘flagging’ posts, (2) some form of verification that abuse of this feature has been occurring, or evidence contradicting it, and (3) a discussion around potential changes to the system.. i personally believe keeping the feature in-place makes sense, to help deal with actual spam, but would recommend implementing some logic to help mitigate its abuse (such as a upvote/comment threshold that, if achieved, negates the effect of flags).

For convenience, here's a link to the item in question:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715168

And here's a history of its ranking, clearly showing flags or other penalizing behavior:

http://hnrankings.info/5715168/

I have no skin in this game, I didn't read the item in question, but I am interested in community dynamics.

Now I've had a brief look at it. Speaking purely for myself I find the ensuing thread a deeply unpleasant read. I don't care about the article in question, but I would flag the thread for its unpleasantness. I haven't, I won't, but I can see why others might feel that the entire argument is non-constructive, and that HN would be better off without it.

Just my opinion, of course, which is probably worth as much as you've paid for it.

Added in edit: We're recently learned that HN has a flame-war detector. I'd be unsurprised to learn that this tripped it.

Do you have show dead turned on? Try turning it on and searching for the item. Maybe it got marked as dead. Maybe it just got flagged to death.

Meta stuff is often killed quickly.

According to the record of rankings provided above it was over an hour before it got flagged enough to affect its rank.

within a minute or two after posting it disappeared off the 'new' page. not sure what would have been the cause but i don't believe flagging would have caused that.