What about community flags?

English
#1

Just now, for the first time in many years of my contribution, I got a message that one of my posts was hidden due to something like community flags. The automatism that sent the message even claimed to know what “the community feels”. I don’t believe that, and I don’t like the claim.

If someone finds a remark of mine inappropriate, aberrant, in short bad for one reason or another, and sends me a PM to that effect, I am likely to be capable of comprehension, and will delete the objected piece. If I am told that (for example) more than 2 users have marked the post “dislike, better hide” and action was taken based on the fact, I can accept that. The way the message actually looked, I have trouble accepting the result. On the other hand, I don’t know how to express my disapproval of a post by flagging it. Are some members of “the community” more equal than others?

#2

If you click the three dots under a post you’ll see some additional icons including a flag; click the flag to see what the flagging options are. I wouldn’t classify any of the options as disapproval in the sense of not agreeing with what you have posted.

My experience with flagging has mostly been for spam or otherwise inappropriate post content which results in the message being immediately hidden, but with an option - at least for me - to view the hidden content.
I suspect (hope) that one may need a certain trust level to have the ability to flag posts otherwise it could become a tool for petty revenge.

I find it surprising that anyone would flag your posts, unless they have for whatever reason misunderstood what you have said.

#3

The relevant text of the mail I got was

Your post was flagged as off-topic: the community feels it is not a good fit for the topic, as currently defined by the title and the first post.

This post was hidden due to flags from the community, so please consider how you might revise your post to reflect their feedback. You can edit your post after 10 minutes, and it will be automatically unhidden.

However, if the post is hidden by the community a second time, it will remain hidden until handled by staff.

For additional guidance, please refer to our community guidelines.

I dont’t like “flame wars”, and I don’t even like a next reading session with the “guidelines”. What I like least is the claim of a piece of software to know what “the community feels”, and I wanted to get one or more statements concerning this.

The post complained of was most likely a twoliner trying to express a faint suspicion that a questioner who used a lot of unobjective jargon and did not answer queries, or answered them verbosely but with little information, might be a troll. Although not a native English speaker, I tried to say this in somewhat witty terms.
“Off Topic” was correct insofar though not quite precise, but I had already tried to do my best concerning actal help.

#4

Where community means one person; perhaps this is a little overstated?

And if every off topic post were flagged, there would be a lot less content here. This, from your summation, sounds like it might be a case of sour grapes.

Trust Level Permissions Table (inc Moderator Roles) - users - Discourse Meta explains inter alia why my flags as a TL4 user have immediate effect

#5

@guilhem
Can we somewhat influence how that flagging with immediate consequence can be triggered, or is that a lost in discourse cause?

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