alt Hacker NewsI don't assess it that way. In any case, I am certain that turning off flags on controversial topics would have a devastating effect. To me that's like saying "let's turn off the immune system for the most fatal viruses".
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Perhaps it's worth considering an algorithmic review of flagging abuse. You can feed a table of flagged comments with the user, the comment the user flagged, and the context, as well as HN's rules, into GPT or a similar AI to get a first approximation of which users are abusing flagging, and on which topics flagging is most abused. I bet you'd find some interesting data!
immune system is great analogy.
- immune system flagged this story because it thought that this story doesn't deserve to be on this site and it won't contribute/create any productive discussion (you can see this sentiment from many people who flagged it). Based on your comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46218920) you turned off flags on this story and created gesturing around this. You essentially did what you just here criticized.
- immune system comes with interesting thing: autoimmune diseases
To be clear, I am not suggesting to eliminate any form of moderation whatsoever. I think threads like these require intensive manual moderation.
I recognize that's a big ask for an already-overburdened mod. I just don't see any good alternative.
Separately, I want to express that while I don't always agree with you, I think you generally do an excellent job moderating and I appreciate your efforts to keep this community free and healthy.