zlacker

>>jseip+(OP)
Hilarious that the original article was flagged off the front page, but this one isn't...

I find it very disheartening that the negative voices are being given so much weight. Everything that's worth doing will have detractors, and when it's something really worth doing it will have vocal detractors. Back when I had comments on my blog, every article I wrote that was any good had at least one person commenting that I was a moron or some equivalent statement.

Great things arouse passion - on both sides.

Giving 10x the power to the people on the negative side just creates an environment where new ideas are discouraged, where important but difficult discourse is pushed aside, where things of true import are penalised out of the group's attention by a few detractors.

There does need to be a system for flagging and removing spam articles, but if this system can (as it plainly regularly is) be co-opted to remove articles from sight just based on not liking them much, then it is broken. The people who have flagging powers are not responsible enough to use them wisely, perhaps.

I see at least one simple solution: lift the flagging privileges so it only becomes available to a much smaller segment of the population. Perhaps making the limit 10'000 instead of 500 would do that. That would still include hundreds of people, based on a quick extrapolation from https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders ). An even better model would be to make it dynamic - perhaps the top 200 commenters...

>>swomba+ab
We don't let users abuse flagging. We have software that identifies users who flag excessive numbers of stories, and we take away their ability to flag.

>>pg+x31
What if an excessive number of stories are off-topic, highly political, spam or otherwise inappropriate? Not all high frequency flaggers are abusive.

>>xiaoma+iV1
I mentioned that I flag pretty much all of the climate change stories, and got my flag powers revoked. C'est la vie, I guess. I still don't think those stories add anything to this site besides some of the same old tired flame wars, so I'd probably continue flagging those and politics if I got the flag link back.

>>davidw+kW1
I'm sorry if this is blunt but in my opinion it is good that your flagging rights were removed. For every person who personally doesn't like climate change stories, there is a person who doesn't like Ruby on Rails stories, a person who doesn't like patent stories, a person who doesn't like NSA stories, and another person who doesn't like Node.js stories. Because flagging has such a strong effect on ranking, it should be reserved for highly inappropriate posts. With great power comes great responsibility.

>>jules+742
There are stories that I don't like, and stories that should not be on this site per the guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hardly any of the climate change stories are "interesting", but basically just "LOOK SEE I AM RIGHT IN MY BELIEFS AND THIS PROVES IT" sorts of articles. Those are poisonous to a site like this - they just beget a lot of useless discussion without much substance in it.

In other words, they are, IMO, highly inappropriate posts, not just stuff I happen to find uninteresting or don't like.

>>davidw+Z42
Climate change articles may not be interesting to you, but they are interesting to plenty of people. Might it just be your already formed belief that they are uninteresting that makes you find most of the climate change articles uninteresting? The comment you wrote here could equally well have been written by a person who is flagging any of the other categories I mentioned. The rules say:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Climate change definitely fits that description. Lets search for climate change: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=climat... None of those articles look any more inappropriate for HN to me, compared to what you'd find for any of the other categories I mentioned.

If you think a comment in a discussion is inappropriate, you shouldn't flag the story, you should flag the comment.

>>jules+k72
Do you really think most of those climate change articles are being posted by people who find them "intellectually gratifying"? I think most of them are pointing to stuff they think supports their own point of view, and they wish to share as widely as possible with the world.

How many articles are there about uncontroversial, but interesting aspects of climate science? Do any of them ever get upvoted, ever?