I liked Slashdot's old moderation system, where you had a drop-down, and you at least had to choose from a few preset "reasons" for your moderation action. It's not perfect, but it might at least cause a few people to pause and reflect on why they feel such a strong urge to get rid of that headline.
For HN, you could map the drop-down contents directly to submission guidelines:
Especially when some things feel like they should have a low threshold for flagging (if 2 people agree it's obvious commerical spam, or terrible-quality content, or a duplicate submission from the past 48 hours), while others feel like they should have a higher threshold (e.g. if 5 people agree it's off-topic for HN, or a threshold proportional to upvotes).
I've also sometimes wanted to flag something for moderator attention, without wanting to give it a "strike". Like the discussion is worth keeping, but point to a better source or something. Your categories somehow solves that.
Comments
I liked Slashdot's old moderation system, where you had a drop-down, and you at least had to choose from a few preset "reasons" for your moderation action. It's not perfect, but it might at least cause a few people to pause and reflect on why they feel such a strong urge to get rid of that headline.
For HN, you could map the drop-down contents directly to submission guidelines:
- Poor/incorrect title
- Non-original source
- Promotion/spam
- ...
I love that.
Especially when some things feel like they should have a low threshold for flagging (if 2 people agree it's obvious commerical spam, or terrible-quality content, or a duplicate submission from the past 48 hours), while others feel like they should have a higher threshold (e.g. if 5 people agree it's off-topic for HN, or a threshold proportional to upvotes).
I've also sometimes wanted to flag something for moderator attention, without wanting to give it a "strike". Like the discussion is worth keeping, but point to a better source or something. Your categories somehow solves that.