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...
It shows articles that came to the front page, in chronological order, so there's no ranking. If the article goes dead, it shows it crossed out.
Presenting a polarizing opinion (non circumspect) is a great way to get people involved and commenting.
For example, which would get more activity:
"No programmer should use perl!"
"Why I personally don't use perl"
"Perl and CGI routines"
PG's comment explaining it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596311
In fact this article does consider the flamewar detector. How accurate it is in it's claims, I do not know.
Not really a big loss for me. One less distraction.
As to flagging, I think a bigger problem is activism-upvoting, in other words upvoting so others see a story and not because it's interesting.
If you don't trust the average user with flagging powers because of how they affect the front page, why do you trust them to upvote good articles onto the front page? Clearly only select users should be able to upvote articles.
It's just a website for people to talk to each other and share links. Trying to out-think the algorithms is, to me, a smell for cynical PR or at best misplaced priorities.
The algorithms will save us. Over optimization is the root of all evil. Smart people are dangerous.
It pulls https://www.hnsearch.com/bigrss and re-sorts it with the basic formula (but without penalties). If people like it/return to it I'll clean up the UI for better readability/mobile use (and display comments there instead of linking back to HN).
EDIT: Interestingly, without penalties it looks like this thread would no longer be on the front page.
They're not. They're controlled by editors who will place items where they want to.
For me, the worst part of hacker news is the silent banning if you are critical of any YC funded startup. Censorship is ugly, but it happens routinely.
I doubt I used more than double-digit flags in the 6+ years I've been here.
I'll be modifying my page to highlight penalized items and calculate their penalty when I have a bit of time.
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.
"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.
How many articles are there about uncontroversial, but interesting aspects of climate science? Do any of them ever get upvoted, ever?
But whether or not YOU should find these articles intellectually gratifying is beside the point. We already have a feature for those kind of articles: don't upvote them. Flagging is not for those kind of stories. Again, if you find a discussion inappropriate, flag the comments in the discussion. Anyway, I don't think this discussion is going to be productive any more, so this will be my last comment.
Wouldn't it make sense to remove the upvote option on the article page, surely I'm not the only one who got this wrong (I hope).
I.e. if you get to the article page from the main page, then that's fine. But if you arrive there with no referrer or from somewhere else, then it isn't counted, since quite possibly someone sent you the specific article just to upvote it.
At least that's how I understand it...
I probably would not have flagged the perl/gnuplot one, I'll grant you that one.
Node.js articles are on topic, even if one or the other happens to be boring. So I would not flag them, even the most uninteresting ones.
But the weight of every flag should depend on how well user's downvoting correlate with your own downvoting.
If there is no correlation between user and you - then downvoting should not affect ranking.
That way you would get types of stories you don't like on HN to be quickly downvoted.