Of course I realize that, as well as that what I read is not purely random, but one can make a ballpark guess based on a sampling. I mean, I’ve read 144,000 posts here. I can take a fair stab at it. And it turns out my guess was right, anyway.
I should have based my guess on my own experience (I flag maybe a post every month or two). Now that I give it more thought, yeah, I don’t know why I had such a high number in my head. That’s obviously ludicrous.
Well, with the other reasons people might flag a post you mentioned — I didn’t think about those — so I would have upwardly revised my estimate, I think, but not by much. I also run a neighborhood Facebook group of 5k members so I have that as a very rough data point, too, for how often things get flagged.
There are also serial reporters from what I remember back in 2016(?). We had one guy who seemed to report something every damned day, and most of his reports were not founded. Between that and people who make it their full - time job to troll this place, mods put up with a lot of crap.
I would say the most common reasons to flag a post are:
This poster is trolling (often just a vehement disagreement)
This thread is blowing up (almost always accurate)
This thread is in the wrong forum (almost always accurate)
Please fix the title of this thread (usually appropriate)
Discourse itself flags likely spam, and does a really good job of it. We still get a fair number of spam reports from posters, but Discourse picks up (and usually auto-hides) the vast majority.
Really. I would have guessed there would be a lot of flags for what some would call political correctness: the post is misogynistic, racist, homophobic …
No. We certainly get some of those, but they are less common than the ones I listed. I may underestimate those as they may be less common in my moderation categories than in GD, but I’m pretty sure I have the general volume right.
(Those posts probably get more people reporting them than most of the others, though. But Discourse shows all the reports of a post in one “lump”, so I don’t usually notice exactly how many people flagged something. One, two, many…)
Oh, and hijack reports are pretty common, too. What_Exit mentioned that. They are generally more problematic in GQ than in IMHO, MPTIMS, or Cafe Society, so I don’t get as many of those reports.
In theory MPSIMS is very conversational and it takes more to count as a hijack. IMHO is often the same. The Café is often prone to hijacks though. Usually through lock-jawed nitpicks.
I think our flag report observations mesh pretty closely. Looking at your list and my scattered thought above.
IMO, we used to have more cause to flag those kinds of posts, but not so much recently, I’d say. That it was after a lot of long-time posters of a more conservative bent left or were pushed, is probably no coincidence. The changing rules in GD and the more active enforcement of the misogyny policy also helped keep a lid on things, no doubt.
I did flag something outright misogynist last month.
Note that too many outstanding, unhandled flags will automatically cause a topic to temporarily close. This is a safety feature in discourse.
That came up before. It was happening way too often for a bit, with mods complaining. I don’t know if the numbers that triggered that were adjusted or if it was just the demotion of all Tier 3 people back to Tier 2 that fixed it. (Tier 3 was never intended to be used here, but some posters wound up promoted anyways. I’m not sure we ever found out what caused that.)
I do know I’ve not seen any other threads that were closed by @system since that time, and only one post hidden for getting too many reports (and it was spam). So whatever changed, it seems to have worked. I admit I was concerned for a little bit.
Quite a lot of “likely spam” posts get hidden by the system. Often I’ll see half a dozen first thing in the morning, before anyone has checked them out. It’s a rare day that doesn’t have at least one or two. (unless I sleep in.) Most of those posts ARE spam and get dealt with by a mod.