Hiding the post's score to ANYONE if a post is flagged

Hello.
Wanted to create a seperate topic about this since I figured it would pollute the topic it was originally stated in.
Basically forum #141700.
The idea is that Approvers should only look at an image per se. The score and favcount shouldn't matter at all when re-approving a flagged post or even approving a post pending approval. We keep saying that it shouldn't matter, yet posts are highlighted in the mod queue and posts with less score have less chances of getting approved (male focus, scenery) and some Approvers are using exactly this as a measure to approve or disapprove a post.
Since the posts should be evaluated by all Approvers the same the hiding of the score should apply to even Administrators and Moderators.

The post s still searchable via order:score or score:16 (if the flagged post has score 16) of course. But it shouldn't be that obvious.

I agree on this - for both the score and favcount. They're never an indication of post quality - one just needs to look at status:deleted order:score parent:none -photoshop -nude_filter for proof.

I'm not sure though about non-flagged pending posts. Maybe just hide the score in the queue and remove the green background for positive scores, but keep the red for negative ones. I've seen multiple times pretty horrible posts high scores and favorites and showing as green on the queue shortly after upload because normal users care nothing about the quality of an image past a certain point as long as it has swimsuit & large_breasts.

Are there no objections?

Provence said:

Are there no objections?

I have severe doubts over the this claim:

Provence said:

You know that people keep saying that the score should have nothing to do with flagging or approving a post? But then people are using exactly this as reason when appealing a post or approving them.

As well, I object on principle for any changes aimed at reducing transparency in order to influence how other people use the site.

If you have issues with how approvers or appealers use metrics, then perhaps some discussion or coaching to lay down some guidelines would be more... constructive? Instead of going straight for the nuclear option of hiding useful information that people would want for other reasons. Is this really a big enough problem to justify altering how the process works?

Actually, I'm quite surprised this request hasn't gone through immediately like with your suggestion to hide flagged images by masking their border colours into the pending queue.

I'm getting annoyed now at certain things being hidden on the main post page just because of how prolific uploaders, flaggers, approvers go about their habits. I'd say go with Squishy's suggestion and lay out more constructive guides for flagging and appealing.

I don't think it makes sense to do this for flagged posts but not for pending posts. All posts in the modqueue should be treated the same. Hiding scores for pending posts is a non-starter though, so I don't think doing it for flagged posts is sensible.

Provence said:

Are there no objections?

I can reluctantly agree with hiding flagged scores/favs.

Provence said:

Are there no objections?

I object. While I don't approve posts based on it, I would always like to be able to see it's score.

tapnek said:

I'm getting annoyed now at certain things being hidden on the main post page just because of how prolific uploaders, flaggers, approvers go about their habits. I'd say go with Squishy's suggestion and lay out more constructive guides for flagging and appealing.

I agree strongly with this. Also appeals should be integrated into the queue system. Currently they are put in a massive pool with little approvor's eyes meeting them or the same with the dedicated forum thread.

Squishy said:
Instead of going straight for the nuclear option of hiding useful information that people would want for other reasons. Is this really a big enough problem to justify altering how the process works?

How is post score useful if approvers are (ideally) meant to disregard it? I'm not against hiding post score or favourite count from flagged posts since, especially for older posts, these could have accumulated with time along with any bias (approvers themselves having it in their favourites for e.g.). I don't think, however, that pending posts would have the same problem, at least not often, due to the 3-day limit.

chinatsu said:

Also appeals should be integrated into the queue system. Currently they are put in a massive pool with little approvor's eyes meeting them or the same with the dedicated forum thread.

I also feel like they should be treated equal to flagged/pending posts. It seems like appeals are just a random lament over the deletion of a post that's just there forever.

-1 For reasons already stated, but also because I've seen posts with high scores not be (re)approved and vice-versa, so score isn't the end-all be-all. I'd much rather have a custom CSS for approvers who feel like they can't trust their own opinion to make unbiased opinions instead of forcing it on everyone.

BrokenEagle98 said:

-1 For reasons already stated, but also because I've seen posts with high scores not be (re)approved and vice-versa, so score isn't the end-all be-all. I'd much rather have a custom CSS for approvers who feel like they can't trust their own opinion to make unbiased opinions instead of forcing it on everyone.

How about just removing the green background then? Because currently it looks like this no matter what other approvers have said on the matter. A post can have 5 "poor quality" messages and still be marked as green.

nonamethanks said:

How about just removing the green background then? Because currently it looks like this no matter what other approvers have said on the matter. A post can have 5 "poor quality" messages and still be marked as green.

Removes the background for positive and negative scores:

.post-pos-score,
.post-neg-score {
  background: white;
}

BrokenEagle98 said:

Removes the background for positive and negative scores:

.post-pos-score,
.post-neg-score {
  background: white;
}

Well the point is that it's not for those who are already aware of it, but for anyone who thinks scores are an indication of whether a post should be approved. See in particular the arguments raised in topic #14844.

Marking posts as green solely because they have a score of three or more is dangerous especially given how many lottery approvers are there that think it's fine to approve anything with that color.

Also, we have almost 2M posts with score above two. Positive scores are meaningless to gauge the quality of the post, so it shouldn't look like they have any meaning in the queue.

nonamethanks said:

Also, we have almost 2M posts with score above two. Positive scores are meaningless to gauge the quality of the post, so it shouldn't look like they have any meaning in the queue.

I agree that highlighting the queue seems meaningless, but I'm not exactly sure how much an influence it makes. There are currently 45K+ posts with a score above 2 that are currently deleted, 10K+ of which are just from this last year. To put the prior number into perspective, there are 308K+ active images for this last year, and 1.9M+ for all time.

• Active/Deleted ratio:
• Last year: ~ 30 to 1
• All time: ~ 40 to 1

So if anything, approvers disregard the score nowadays even more than they have in the past.

Still, I wouldn't be opposed to removing the highlighting in the queue. It seems a bit unnecessary, and the highlighting only reflects the information that is currently available, namely the score and the presence of certain tags.

BrokenEagle98 said:

I agree that highlighting the queue seems meaningless, but I'm not exactly sure how much an influence it makes. There are currently 45K+ posts with a score above 2 that are currently deleted, 10K+ of which are just from this last year. To put the prior number into perspective, there are 308K+ active images for this last year, and 1.9M+ for all time.

• Active/Deleted ratio:
• Last year: ~ 30 to 1
• All time: ~ 40 to 1

So if anything, approvers disregard the score nowadays even more than they have in the past.

Still, I wouldn't be opposed to removing the highlighting in the queue. It seems a bit unnecessary, and the highlighting only reflects the information that is currently available, namely the score and the presence of certain tags.

Then why not making it complete meaningless? There seems a trend and one should support it even more.

Not something that concerns me personally; still I dislike any information being hidden away from people for their own good; just as I object to developers taking away options from users for their own good.

Don't really want to drop this topic here, yet.
But I think that people do misunderstand that this here is no try to hide away information from the users but it should ensure that approvers do only focus on the image that is right in front of them and yeah, these numbers do influence our judgement (who would approve a guro post that already has a score of -6?)
There are some approvers who make their decision based on the amount of favorites and sores a post has and that shouldn't be happening if we say that only the image per se should be evaluated. If the score is shown then we take this also into the equation. That's not done by all Approvers but one Approver might be already too much and it would also help low or negative scoring posts to find a more equal treatment.

Also, in my opinion this isn't really hiding any information from the users since the post is still searchable via score searches. The number is just blank. It also wouldn't be for forever. If the flag reason is resolved then the number gets shown again and in the worst case a score only gets hidden for 3 days and not many posts are getting flagged, anyway. Meaning the portion of posts without visible score is next to none.

I agree with you that the complaints about "censoring" information are missing the point. Not showing a particular piece of information in a particular place isn't censorship, it's a design choice. An example: the modqueue doesn't show how many favorites a post has, or which people disapproved a post. This isn't censorship, it's choosing not to show things that aren't relevant.

That said, my issue with this is that it means flagged posts will be treated differently from pending posts. It's not a huge deal, but I don't like the inconsistency of it very much.

A bigger issue is that approvers will still be able to tell how popular a post is based on favorites and disapprovals. Of course favorites could be hidden too, but that would make this more annoying to people. As for disapprovals, if a post is heavily downvoted you'll probably be able to tell by how many poor quality disapprovals it has. I don't think you can effectively hide how popular a post is without causing other problems.

One thing I agree with is that the modqueue shouldn't highlight posts based on score. I wouldn't disagree with removing scores from the modqueue page specifically.