Are you sure you lost them? Scanning through the posts here, it seems a lot of people just don't know where to look. You have to click "link" on a comment, or reply to the comment to be taken to the text editor screen. From either of these screens, the "flag" option appears.
Now, whether this is good or bad UX is up to the admins to decide. I assume "flag" is buried a little bit to prevent abuses of it, just as replying to someone's replies to yourself is delayed a little bit to prevent rapidfire back-and-forths.
I lost my flagging ability long ago. I habitually flagged political stories that others upvoted. Apparently going against the crowd flagged me for flagging. Heh.
Not the way I'd design it to work, but then it's not my site.
Yeah I've wondered about that. I've flagged some BS political stories too and wondered if I was endangering my flagging privileges by disagreeing. I don't really care, but interesting to know.
I have flagging, in the ~1000 karma range, so it still exists. I've hardly ever used it.
I'm not sure that flagging is meant for shooting down topic matter you'd rather not see on HN. And that's why the ability is removed from those who overuse it. Flagging is for blatant spam or personal attacks or other abuses, it's not a content-selection mechanism. Upvotes select content.
AFAIK there's no "flag" on comments, just stories (conversely, there's no downvotes for stories, just comments). Or maybe I just don't have enough karma to see it (or I lost it long ago).
An other weird thing about HN: sometimes I can't see the "reply" link on a comment for a while, even if I reload.
Like, I wanted to reply to your post earlier but I couldn't even though ch0wn had already posted his own. I don't understand what triggers that behaviour.
There is flag on both submissions and comments. There is downvote on comments, but not on submissions. The "Reply" link is deliberately delayed on deep threads to help mitigate flame wars. These are all well-known features.
I agree it is not obvious to those who first come across these things. However, it is very well-known to anyone who searches for the countless threads about this very issue. Sadly, most people just ask the question without first researching the issue, and that then prompts several demonstrably incorrect answers.
It's also in the FAQ and the guidelines if you read hard enough, but some of the subtleties of the questions are not explained there (probably because they were fluid for a while).
AFAIK there's no "flag" on comments, just stories (conversely, there's no downvotes for stories, just comments). Or maybe I just don't have enough karma to see it (or I lost it long ago).
There were flag links on both comments and stories before they disappeared for me.
An other weird thing about HN: sometimes I can't see the "reply" link on a comment for a while, even if I reload.
It's a feature to help prevent long flamewar threads.
> Do you mean there if a karma threshold on something else?
There's a karma threshold for downvoting and flagging. Those are not new but I ventured a guess that there may now be a similar threshold for upvoting.
I thought it was "common knowledge" that there's a 500 karma threshold to upvote? However, I couldn't find anything "official" right now, other than a reference under:
Given that most people in this thread complaining about their upvotes not registering seem to have a karma below 500 it might well be that. If that's the case I'm surprised they didn't make it explicit by removing the arrow altogether (like the down arrow is not displayed when you don't have enough karma for it). Seems a bit deceitful.
Same here. Lost it on the day when Jobs died trying to get at least something different on the front page.
Also I've been long suspecting that my downvotes don't work either. I have the arrows and they are clickable, but they seem to do anything. Pretty annoying actually.
I noticed that with a new user account the upvote arrow disappears when I click it, but if I refresh the page it comes back and you can see that it didn't really upvote.
How do you know your upvotes don't count? Who knows, maybe there's a karma threshold for that too now.