zlacker

The flags on the last item don't seem to be made in good faith. This looks like abuse of the flag system to me. Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?

>>jeremy+(OP)
By "the last item" you're referring to "Avoid Async Rust at All Cost", right? Personally I don't think that's abuse; I would have flagged that post if I'd seen it. That's despite the fact that I agree with a lot of what's in the post. The title is just too inflammatory. And there are more inflammatory bits in the post, such as saying the feature is "objectively bad", and saying that a community member's post "gracefully omits" some information (where the word "gracefully" sounds like an accusation that they were being disingenuous). Totally unnecessary. Chop off the inflammatory bits and you'd have a perfectly good blog post making an interesting point, but as-is that post was not going to lead to a productive discussion.

>>jeremy+(OP)
I assume you mean this one:

Avoid Async Rust at All Cost - >>39102078 - Jan 2024 (62 comments)

I can make an argument either way there. The argument in favor of flagging it could be: Rust is one of the most-discussed topics on HN; Async Rust in particular has had a ton of discussion [1], including a major thread just a few days earlier [2] - therefore this post was very much in the follow-up category [3]; the article was arguably rather low-quality, especially by the standards of this much-discussed topic; its title was flamebait and arguably misleading as well since the article seems more about async in general; and generally it was more of a drama submission on a classic flamewar topic than an interesting technical piece. I'm not saying all that is fair but it's easy to imagine good-faith users flagging for such reasons.

I checked the flagging histories of those users and only saw two cases where a user had previously flagged a different article about Rust, and one was years ago. For typical examples of other stories that the same users had flagged, see [4] below. A few of those might be borderline calls but I don't see abuse of flagging there. It's important to remember that even when a story is on topic for HN, flags are legit if the story has had a large amount of discussion recently. Otherwise HN would consist of the same few discussions over and over, and we have enough of that as it is!

> Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?

There are some software protections in place against that, but like all such protections, they don't catch all the bad cases and they have false positives as well.

We review the flags and turn flags off sometimes. I would not say it's perfect because although we try to look over all the flagged stories, it has to be done hastily (or one wouldn't get much else done). That makes it easy to miss things. However, users often email us at hn@ycombinator.com when they think a story has been unfairly flagged, and in those cases we always take a closer look. I don't know what percentage of the time we turn flags off in such cases, but it's not a low number. So if we include "users sending emails" as part of "the system", then yes, there's a system for monitoring flag abuse.

Last point: this is a pretty typical case. I'd say it's borderline but in the end I probably agree with the flaggers. If the topic of Rust (and async Rust in particular) weren't already so thoroughly covered, and/or if the flamewar aspect hadn't been there, then I'd probably disagree with the flaggers.

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[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] >>39061839 - the word 'async' appears over 200 times in that thread!

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[4] You Don't Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed - >>39228231 - Feb 2024 (21 comments)

Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough? - >>39191651 - Jan 2024 (151 comments)

New tires every 7k miles? Electric cars save gas; tire wear shocks some drivers - >>39175675 - Jan 2024 (64 comments)

Google layoffs: Tech giant to cut down 30k jobs, says report - >>38791297 - Dec 2023 (6 comments)

Code will make me rich and famous - >>38336699 - Nov 2023 (2 comments)

The NSA Invented Bitcoin? - >>37599194 - Sept 2023 (61 comments)

Leaving the Web3 cult - >>36803267 - July 2023 (47 comments)

How the Military Is Using E-Girls to Recruit Gen Z into Service - >>36471105 - June 2023 (97 comments)

Alphabet plans to announce its new general-use LLM called PaLM 2 at Google I/O - >>35866435 - May 2023 (5 comments)

Is your husband/ boyfriend gay? LGBTQ - >>35734086 - April 2023 (0 comments)

>>comex+ia
Of course, it's only inflammatory because async is a darling to more than half of HN :)

But if we get into that we'll trigger the flame war detection.

>>dang+3g
dang, thanks for taking the time for such a thoughtful response. I didn't know about the policy regarding topics that have been on a lot lately, that makes sense. I've not been around as much lately and hadn't noticed that this topic was well-trodden.