@ivan I agree (couldn't resist: now hoping for more comments to your post)

@ivan
> which ways it may have privacy implication ?

My intuition is that the number of flags in a thread would have the same privacy implications as any other aggregated metric (#posts, #likes, #people,...). Discourse folds flagged posts, which should have about the same privacy implications as showing the number of likes.

Or am I missing something?

> wondering if it is a valid metric though ... A thread
> may have a lot of flagged activities because it talks
> about a complex topic (covid, politics, religion, gender ...)

I agree, many flags could mean different things depending on the topic and the community.

On the other hand, couldn't that also be said about other metrics to some extent? I mean in the sense that before jumping in, I need to use my judgement based on general context (e.g knowledge of the community) and topic title, avatar list, available metrics, etc.

Interesting things can be learnt from threads on hot or complex topics, or where a different set of people engage, and I don't mind being part of community moderation. It's just that being the umpteenth person attempting to get a derailed thread back on track feels like I'm wasting my energy.

In a functional community this is just the odd thread, though, so probably less of a concern for the kind of thing Bonfire aims for?

@mayel @ivan Sounds good, I think that would help me decide on which threads to read through.

I assume there still has to be some kind of clickable "You liked this post" indicator on posts to allow people to "undo" a like.

@ivan Maybe show the number of flagged/reported posts?

Usually when I see many posts being flagged it's a sign of the thread going wildly off-topic or even attracting bad actors. I then stay away from that discussion. However, e.g. in Discourse I won't know until I have read through the posts. Having that metric on the top post would help me spend my time and engagement elsewhere.

Thinking of risks, maybe showing flag stats would attract more of the same? I would hope not in an otherwise functional community, but some people seem to gather around car crashes or houses on fire.