Ask HN: How to unhide stories? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to unhide stories?

7 pointsmattm15 comments

I'm on mobile and accidentally clicked hide for a story I wanted to read. There's no way to undo this?

Well, you can click on your username and click on hidden section. That will give you all hided items.

Thanks!

We're getting this complaint a lot and I'm beginning to think of getting rid of that feature, or maybe restricting it to /newest only. Any thoughts?

Can we have an option to hide hidden stories, default to no, otherwise keeps it where it is but have it faded (also add an unhide right there). Or would that be too convoluted?

Kinda sounds like the latter. Sorry, but I'm afraid that we already have made things a bit too complicated.

I think the problem isn't the feature, so much as the unintuitive way the user interface is implemented. The link to unhide items could show up in the top bar (maybe next to the username) instead of yet another link in the users' profile, and give some visual prompt (maybe with a counter or something) telling the user that there's a relationship between one action and the other.

IMO the top bar needs to stay simple and only show the most important things.

I think it might be more important that people find the features they want to use, than that the top bar remain 'clutter' free.

That's an argument for putting everything up there.

It's an argument for not letting simplicity get in the way of functionality, and designing the interface around the actual usage of the site. Hiding the added complexity of the new features and hoping people just figure it out doesn't keep things elegant.

Although I suppose it's also an argument for having the unhide link in the user profile be a bit more obvious somehow. Either way, it seems like a UI problem, for which the solution may be to either deal with the complaints in order to keep things simple, or else to change the UI to be more intuitive.

I suggest moving things to the top bar because I'm assuming people pay far more attention to it than they do their profiles.

Honestly I think the problem is that the UI doesn't scale well on small screen devices.

Solve that, and you solve a lot of unintentional actions: voting, hiding, following the wrong link, etc.

Get rid of it, or show a counter of hidden stories in the top bar...

Story hiding has slightly weird semantics even when it's working correctly. I think I'm sold on comment hiding (I was a skeptic), but I'd be a vote in favor of punting story hiding.

I vote to keep it.

Why not go the way a lot of modern web apps are going, once you've pressed hide on the story, just have a 'undo' button that disappears after 5-10 seconds.

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