One more - flagging and vouching have an invisible weight to them, and I'm about 90% sure that weight is based on how well your flags and vouches line up with what everyone else does.
I've been here for years, and it used to be that when I flagged things, they went dead instantly. After a particularly controversial thread or two, not so much.
Vouch is the same way - one time I vouched a comment that was pretty plainly insulting, but had something that I thought was valuable for discussion in it. I vouched it, it went alive instantly, I replied, and it was apparently later flagged again. My vouches no longer appear to do anything.
I hate all this cloak and dagger stuff, to be honest. I've more than once stopped myself clicking "flag" because I know that I'll be penalized if I get it wrong (read: enough people disagree with me). And all that stuff above? It's pure speculation, because it's all the UI gives me.
Worse, barring the occasional bit of moderator invention to unkill a post, all of these mechanics serve to enforce a hivemind, whether or not that's the intent. Quality doesn't matter as much as consensus, because the consensus is enforced transparently, the quality with intervention.
I thought about not flagging anymore, but so what. I‘m offering my ratings, and if HN doesn‘t want to use them, so be it. And it feels good to flag shitposts.
> I hate all this cloak and dagger stuff, to be honest.
I'm sure most agree. But the purpose of the obfuscation is to make the jobs of those who wish to abuse the system harder. So we, normal users, are trading the inconvenience of an opaque system in exchange for (hopefully) a less abused system. I'm willing to make that trade and, as the sibling points out, you might as well flag/vouch/vote/downvote and let dang and company do as they please with the data you've offered them.
Personally, as long as HN continues to be better than Reddit, for the kind of discussions I come here for, I will continue to participate regardless of the underlying system.
I've been here for years, and it used to be that when I flagged things, they went dead instantly. After a particularly controversial thread or two, not so much.
Vouch is the same way - one time I vouched a comment that was pretty plainly insulting, but had something that I thought was valuable for discussion in it. I vouched it, it went alive instantly, I replied, and it was apparently later flagged again. My vouches no longer appear to do anything.
I hate all this cloak and dagger stuff, to be honest. I've more than once stopped myself clicking "flag" because I know that I'll be penalized if I get it wrong (read: enough people disagree with me). And all that stuff above? It's pure speculation, because it's all the UI gives me.
Worse, barring the occasional bit of moderator invention to unkill a post, all of these mechanics serve to enforce a hivemind, whether or not that's the intent. Quality doesn't matter as much as consensus, because the consensus is enforced transparently, the quality with intervention.