Flagging legitimate threads by some members is the worst thing on HN. A thread can have a hundred upvotes but just a few flags will move it out from the front-page, effectively killing the discussion. Something has to be done about this, i.e. ignore flaggings once a thread gets 15 points and maybe alert the mods so they can make human decision on whether leave it or flag out.
That isn't far from the way things work now, and worked in the case of this thread.
I'd add: (1) the community doesn't necessarily agree about what's legitimate. I don't see any evidence that the flags on this one are less in good faith than the upvotes; (2) upvotes can't be the only factor determining HN's front page; that would make it consist of controversy, gossip, and fashion, and undermine the reason why readers come here in the first place.
Thanks for the reply, I'm sorry for the off-topic discussion, it's just that I witnessed several times how a thread is doing very well (like 50 points in 10 minutes), is in the first places on the FP, then in a minute it's on the bottom of the FP, in another minute it's on the third page. So I though it must be the flaggings. Is HN's ranking algorithm public?
If a topic gets 40 comments before it gets 40 votes, it gets auto-penalized even with no flags. (too controversial)
There are also other mechanisms, such as vote-ring-detection, that can kill a topic as well.
(That is my current understanding anyway, I am not HN staff, and I am not saying whether I agree/disagree with any of these mechanisms, just stating them to help alleviate your confusion about why some topics may be doing very well and then suddenly die -- it's not always because of flagging)
> If a topic gets 40 comments before it gets 40 votes, it gets auto-penalized even with no flags. (too controversial)
I've heard about this before and it still sounds crazy to me. I comment quite a bit, and almost never upvote topics. Using the standard "other people are like me" heuristic, I deduce that the normal operation of HN involves automatically killing all the topics.
It's more likely that other people are in fact nothing like me, but I'd like to understand this a bit better.
Well this specific submission seems highly relevant, and so far it hasn't been flagged off the front page yet :)
OT: I agree there is a lot of downvoting of submissions and comments with a political slant. Anything that's phrased as being slightly partisan seems to be immediately downvoted by people from the other side of the political spectrum because they don't agree with it.
I have in the past flagged blatantly political articles that align perfectly with my own opinions, simply because they had no place on HN. There are better places for politics; see also http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ .
In this case, I think this article is relevant for the HN audience, because of the massive technology-related threat involved here.
I'm unclear as to how this thread is legitimate, personally. Doesn't seem to really fit with HN. I'm no fan of the Patriot Act either, but this belongs somewhere like Reddit.
IMHO this has a very direct impact on many internet start up (and not start up) businesses, as well as touches on the very important subject of legality and ethics of data collection and privacy by government as well as businesses.
Not only that, but HN will also usually post the very best possible links to big news stories that affect the HN audience as they break, which is a great feature of this website.
Whlie this may not be a huge story, it will likely be the talk of the day tomorrow.
The Patriot Act (and policy in general) can have a serious impact on software companies for sure.
However, this is a politically charged thread clearly aimed at drawing interest/support for an individual candidate. This is not supposed to be permitted on HN.
A thread discussing the potential issues caused by the Patriot Act is much more suitable for the front page than this.
Well it _is_ Rand Paul on the floor, how else would you like to phrase it?
I've got no political interest in this either way, since I'm not American. So consider it an outsiders view when I say that I think it's not unreasonable to mention the person who's taking the action.
People and businesses have moved their data away from USA-based companies because of worries about privacy. The outcome of this bill will directly affect the ability of US tech companies to attract overseas customers.
That doesn't necessarily matter. It's well established by now that communities tend to upvote things they "like", not specifically things that belong. We know there's a large overlap between users of HN and Libertarians, which in itself is fine, but it doesn't mean this type of discussion should be occurring here.
I think you're missing the point entirely. I'm not saying my opinion matters, I'm just pointing out that this thread is definitely not supposed to be on HN, as is defined by the rules of the website. I'm not positing an opinion, I'm arguing for a fact.
> I'm just pointing out that this thread is definitely not supposed to be on HN, as is defined by the rules of the website.
The applicable "rules" (actually, they are labeled "guidelines" [0] for good reason) can be viewed as either supporting or opposing it.
Specifically, one could view it as on-topic as falling within "anything that good hackers would find interesting." (Section 215 surveillance clearly has a special interest within the "hacker" culture, which is more plugged into it than the general population), or as probably off-topic because "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
> I'm not positing an opinion, I'm arguing for a fact.
You are positing your interpretation of the application of rules which are fuzzy and inherently subjective as "fact", and where the only things in the rules that would support your conclusion are hedged with "most" or "probably". Your suggestion that the HN guidelines can reasonably be read in a way in which the topic here would be unequivocally, factually off-topic is an untenable argument.
No, the rules state that this post should not be here.
You're conflating opinion and fact. Please stop. Majority vote does not dictate fact. HN is not a "anything and everything can be on the front page of the community votes it as such" site like Reddit is.
What rule is this violating? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html says "anything that good hackers would find interesting" is on-topic, which clearly enough "good hackers" do given the upvotes. The "most stories about politics" clearly doesn't say "all stories about politics", and this one has a lot of relevance to the tech world.
Meanwhile, you're definitely breaking the "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site." rule.
By complaining that the submission is inappropriate:
GlickWick: I'm unclear as to how this thread is legitimate, personally. Doesn't seem to really fit with HN. I'm no fan of the Patriot Act either, but this belongs somewhere like Reddit.
Which was in reply to a question about why the thread was being flagged. This was not an unprompted complaint about an inappropriate submission, this was a reply to a question.
That is not true. If a user asks a question about the rules or the validity of a post/flagging, it's fine to discuss.
You don't like the fact that I'm criticizing this thread, which is fine, but stop trying to cherry-pick silly reasons to discredit what I'm saying. It's having the opposite effect of what you intended anyways.
That is just your opinion. Rules are clear on this:
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.
As you can see, no additional caveats are listed. Therefore you, by responding to a comment which was about incorrect flagging, complained about inappropriate submissions, directly violated the rules.
Your last paragraph is basically just ad-hominem.
I'm ending this "discussion" here and will not be reading your inevitable further comments.
You're right that the rules do not exclude all politics, only most. GlickWick is right that upvotes alone do not determine HN's front page and about the weakness of the voting mechanism in general.
HN has long been a bastion of Ron Paul fandom, going back as far as the founding of the board. So there's backstory here.
I don't support either political party, and the odds are great that I will not vote for Rand Paul.
However, as a technical person living in a democratic society I _am_ interested in the factors that change public policy, whether it's a RP filibuster, a Snowden leak, or a public move on policy by Wyden.
Perhaps if the tech community pulled together, somebody like Wyden could cross the aisle and make it a bipartisan filibuster. Whether you like either guy or either party or not is immaterial. The important thing is to try to get a little momentum here. The system is totally hosed, and we've got a long way to go to get it functioning again.
Similarly, I doubt that the interest in the current post has much to do with partisan support for a candidate. Given the community's interests, it is more likely because of what he's talking about.
I agree that public policy that impacts software is very relevant to HN in general. However, this post is clearly meant to draw focus to supporting a political candidate specifically.
A thread about the cons of the renewal of the Patriot Act without the obvious Libertarian political candidate undertones would be much more fitting for the front page of HN.
Yeah, this is a live stream of a political speech by a presidential candidate. I bet we wouldn't see any complaints about flagging if this was a flagged live stream of Hillary Clinton talking about immigration reform.
That stuff doesn't belong either, and you should flag it. Not entirely sure what the point of this reply was. Are you saying that we should post irrelevant things across the spectrum to get revenge on people who post other irrelevant things?
