HN: New flag feature | Hacker News Reader

HN: New flag feature

64 pointsnaish89 comments

Posts now appear with a flag link. Anyone care to explain its proper use?

You guys are so fast I didn't have time to write anything about it. The purpose is to let users over a certain karma threshold flag spam and troll submissions.

It should only be used for spams and really egregious trolling, not for stuff that's merely vapid or mistaken or off-topic.

Please don't click on it just to try it out. Flags are really being recorded, so flagging something randomly could damage the reputation of the flagger and/or the submitter of the thing that got flagged.

Can you add an option for disabling flagging? I probably won't use the option that often (maybe once every few days if not more), so I'd like to hide it until I need it. Too much clutter.

Yeah, on reflection it is a bit much to have the flag link appear everywhere, so I made it appear only on that item's page.

That made a huge difference. This looks much better now.

Here's a random idea... Display a text box that requires a reason for flagging the post or comment.

That would cut down on flagging for the sake of flagging.

"... Here's a random idea... Display a text box that requires a reason for flagging the post or comment. ..."

It's not a bad idea but it has the same problem as trying to describe why you like something instead of agreeing. I know there's a talk by Barry Schwartz on decision theory ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=paradox+of+choice that argues against explaining instead of just choosing. A flag is enough. People around here are pretty smart. The reasons why will mostly be obvious.

The only thing I don't like is it ius close to the "delete","parent" tag. My clumsy mouse-hands might hit it by mistake.

Isn't that premature?

And if some really use it inappropriately then they could just lose their right to flag. No need to bother the vast majority who will use it when it's deserved.

Whether it's premature or not, I'm just putting the idea out there. The question is, what does that take away? If the item is truly flagworthy, then it shouldn't be any problem filling in a box.

The added benefit is that you have much less accidental flagging.

The question is, what does that take away?

Simplicity.

all barriers to doing something do, in fact, matter. the more barriers, the less people will use the flag.

just like any tiny barrier to signing up for your website is important.

Can you make it so that user's first click on the 'flag' link would bring up a short explanation of what the 'flag' does ?

I'm sure a lot of people are going to be clicking on it just because it is there. I know I would've if I hadn't ran into this thread first :)

(edit) Would it make sense to display current flag count ? Perhaps if it's over certain threshold. It is after all an interesting metric.

How about an unflag toggle or an undo?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226414

You can now unflag.

Thanks. Would you mind moving the flag link location to not be on the rightmost edge? I think if you see below others also feel the same way. The right edge is the first place I instinctively click, and flag is the least likely use case.

Anecdotal evidence in support of your request, I just had the following happen: Read a headline I'm interested in. Looked at the flag button because it's new and interesting. Decided to check out the comments for the headline...And clicked flag.

Maybe incidence of this will go down in the future, but the link I'm least likely to click is right next to the one I'm most likely to click, so the mistake is easy.

We're fast? You're fast.

"Exploratory programming" in action :D

how about un-upvote or un-downvote? can we have that please?

HN appears to be all about not being able to undo things. Is there any operation that's undo-able, other than deleting your own posts?

Is there anything that's not undoable, except voting?

Voting's a pretty big one. I'll own up to the fact that I often use votes as more of a bookmarking tool, to follow up on promising links later when I have more time. As a result, I get the urge to unvote something every once in a long while when I realize that it doesn't deserve good karma.

Although if the intent is to discourage that usage pattern and make people more careful about voting in the first place, then it works, at least in my case. I use votes as bookmarks much more extensively on digg, where I know I can undo them.

I agree with the voting thing. Although with me, I'm just more likely to accidentally vote something up or down from not being precise enough when clicking. I pay a lot more attention to the precise location of my cursor now, but it used to be bad.

It seems best to keep voting as a permanent operation. That will require people to think a little harder about whether a story or comment is truly worth an upvote.

Sometimes my mouse slips and I accidentally downmod an excellent comment.

Would you write better code if your text editor didn't have undo and you didn't use version control? Probably not.

I don't think "voting permanency == more thought before voting" is true for most people. I was saying it was true in my case and even so, it was a (relatively) long time before I noticed that unvoting was missing and that I still use votes as bookmarks, just less often than before. Plus it seems like an inefficient way to cut down on votes for bad links compared to being able to take back a mistaken vote.

More importantly, although I've reduced my usage of votes as bookmarking, I don't see why that's a good thing. The implied counter example is that if people could unvote, it would be a giant safety net and unleash a tidal wave of spurious votes, with people clicking on stories willy nilly because their actions were reversable. This doesn't sound true - more realistic scenarios are that there'd be a slight bump in votes overall or even a reduction of "bad" votes by allowing people to correct misclicks.

Thinking about my usage patterns, I bet a lot of people realize they can't take back their votes, use votes as bookmarks anyway and are simply annoyed at not being able to trim down their "saved" list by removing outdated/mistaken/irrelevant links. The lack of an undo feature doesn't change most people's actions unless they notice in advance that it's missing because the action they're about to perform is something really important, like paying for something or deleting their writing.

A big chunk of the problem may simply be the verbiage and language of the profile page. I can see how newish people (like myself) misunderstand voting for saving because votes are displayed as "Saved: ##" rather than "Votes: ##" instead. Saving implies bookmarking, as well as unsaving. Being able to "unvote" sounds unnatural, it sounds like what happened to Gore in Florida and nobody would expect to take back their participation in a poll. Whereas "unsaving" doesn't sound weird and is a routine operation.

I've seen the voting=bookmarking discussion on reddit too. If it's such a big deal, why does neither site offer a bookmarking link? Any other reason except feature trimming? Looks like a sound idea to me...

I've accidentally upvoted one of the worst posts I've seen on HN before, because I was using a mobile device. Maybe the arrows should be two or three times as big when a mobile browser is detected?

Doing anything and waiting for some time. But I guess that's by design.

Is there some sort of cost associated with flagging? I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "could damage the reputation of the flagger".

If someone flags stuff that turns out to be good (as measured by e.g. not later being killed), it would be reasonable to ignore their flags in future. The sw doesn't do that yet, but when and if that feature appears, it will be based on all flags ever made by an account.

'flag' is now where 'parent' used to be (last link). Until the users get accustomed to this, there might be some unintentional flagging.

You can now unflag.

Thanks.

Presumably, you're wasting moderator time, for which you will burn in hell eternally! By which I mean, you might lose navbar colour and flagging privileges.

Navbar colour?

I have 143 karma but I don't see that yet (although I do see 'flag'). Hmm.

Er, I didn't say nothing about the navbar secret. >_>

Seriously, you get to change the colour of the orange bar at the top when you're at or above 250 karma. Either then or if you can be bothered to set up some user CSS or javascript. :) No idea if there are further perks beyond that.

When you hit 2001 karma you become the Star-Child.

Okay, not really. In fact, I'm not sure there are any perks beyond that, either. :)

That brings up a pretty valid point - has anyone broken down what happens with what level of karma?

I know at 5 you can downvote comments, and at 250 you can change your bar color. Somewhere in there, you can create polls, but I don't know how that works, so I don't know what level karma is needed.

I'm pretty sure I could downvote from 25. Maybe it was originally 5. (seeing as I joined much later than you)

I'm at 408, and I can't see a way to start polls, so I'm guessing that's at 500.

You're probably right about the 25 - I'm still pretty new and my karma is at 17, so I don't see downvoting. I hope the minimum number doesn't keep moving up on me as I approach it :)

It's 21 to down vote. I recently got that ability.

It's possible that it has always been 25... I've been wrong before, and I'll be wrong again ;)

Those who know won't tell. And those who tell don't know.

"you get to change the colour of the orange bar at the top when you're at or above 250 karma"

Thanks for pointing that out. I now have a blue top bar!

There is no navbar secret!

"There is no YC kabal"

"These aren't the droids you're looking for."

That kinda sucks. It's already precisely the color I'd make it.

The first rule of the Navbar cool club is to never talk about the navbar cool club.

I hit it by accident yesterday, hoping something like "Do you really want to flag this?" would pop up, as does in other features here. To avoid spurious clicks, I would suggest adding a two-phase commit.

The flag link is appearing on [deleted] posts. Just thought you'd want to know.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226682

It appears both comments and posts have the "flag". I can understand flagging spam posts but comments already have the upvote/downvote mechanism.

Does it really make sense to "flag" comments?

yes, so spam comments can be deleted and the account banned.

Dupes?

What threshold? I hate to think about karma... I think it's bad for our community.

I have it but I still think it is an anti-future, please, remove it

whoops... excuse my first few flags then... I gave them to some that were merely off topic.

I suspect it's a "report this post to the moderators" feature, although so far I've not really seen the need for it, so who knows.

EDIT: Ugh, it's already annoying me on the new/front pages, as the "<n> comments"/"discuss" links are harder to see and click now.

pg, would you mind swapping the "flag" and "discuss" links on story listing pages? Thanks!

EDIT2: same for the "parent" link on thread pages, I've had a couple near misses in the last 2 minutes.

It's funny... I hadn't realized the extent to which my subconscious was trained to scan down the right-hand side of the links, evaluating the "X comments" display and using it as a guide for what to click on.

When I hit the homepage I got this sudden feeling of wrongness in my stomach, like vertigo. Only then did I consciously see the new "flag" links.

So, yeah, I also vote to move the flag links to the left.

(This reminds me of Teresa Nielsen Hayden's stories about the superhumanly-talented copy editors who perceive typos as literally jumping out of the page, or blinking, or who feel physical pain at the sight of misspelled words.)

I agree with this. At the moment the "flag" link, which you want to use very rarely, is more prominent than the "comments" link, which you want to use often. Maybe changing the colours to make "comments" dark and "flag" light might work as well.

Yes, but what is considered kosher to report?

1. Blatant machine-generated spam?

2. Really nasty stuff? (child porn, incitement to violence)

3. Slightly nasty stuff? (ordinary porn, Rick Astley)

4. Slightly spammy stuff? (unjustifiable advertising-like links?)

5. Comments which are insulting or nasty?

6. Comments which are just plain stupid?

7. Comments which only slightly stupid?

8. Things which you think are "not appropriate for HN"?

9. Other categories of stuff you don't want to see?

update: Never mind, answered by pg elsewhere.

Agreed that right now its positioning is too prominent: at the row-end it's easier to see and click than other more frequently-used links. The problem is especially evident on the front page: it was rare for spam to reach there, but now it's harder to visually target every 'comments' link.

Moving 'flag' leftward on the line would help a bit. Making it only appear on the clikthrough page for an individual story or comment would help a lot -- requiring an extra click to flag something but not imposing clutter on all good contributions.

At some point anti-crime measures themselves become a community bummer. 'Flag' links everywhere are a little like walking through a neighborhood where all the windows/doorways are protected by metal bars.

What percentage of our attention is soaked up by defense? Over a certain threshold and the spamorrists have "won".

There should be a popup confirmation and the action should bring you back to where you were last, instead of the top of the page. Ideally, the row where the username where you clicked flag (starting from the point total and ending with the flag link) would turn yellow, and also keep you on that same page, like the voting buttons (which use ajax).

I am so tempted to just press it and see what happens. But I fear that I will end up banishing you to the netherworld.

I'm hoping somebody will start submitting some rubbish stories so I can try flagging them.

I flagged this post :-) (the post, not your comment)

edit1: I did this before pg explained what 'flag' is for. Now I feel bad.

edit2: oops... I am used to clicking on the last link 'parent'. Did it once by mistake on a comment.

i wish we could un-flag. some will be curious to what will happen if you click on it.

ok; here's the source, btw:

  (def flaglink (i user whence)
    (when (and user (> (karma user) flag-threshold*))
      (pr bar*)
      (w/rlink (do (if (mem user i!flags)
                       (pull user i!flags)
                       (push user i!flags))
                   (save-item i)
                   whence)
        (pr (if (mem user i!flags) "unflag" "flag")))))

There are some things man was not meant to know.

Deleted comment

Hm, all I see is a toggle: my post now says "flagged". I presume this means that Anubis is weighing my heart and deciding whether I'm bound for the netherworld.

Okay, upon further warning from PG, I deleted my flagged post to save myself from the netherworld.

This uncovered a bug: a deleted + flagged post produces a strange looking thing in Safari: the words "deleted" and "flagged" superimposed on each other.

Same for 10.4 / FF2.

same for FF3/WIN

Same for FF3 / Hardy Heron.

Same for opera.

Same for (corporate-provided) IE 6.

Same for FF3 / 10.5.

same for IE7

Well that was boring. The "flag" link changed to "flagged". No big explanatory screen like craigslist.

Flag! You're it. Now I probably get banned for misusing it. ;)

The flag link still shows for deleted comments

heh...could we have a list of flagged posts, in the lists page?

That would be neat. Then we could use "flag" to mean "really good" and restrict upvoting to those-in-the-know and those-with-lots-of-karma. The main page would then be just a front for the underground hackernews community :)

Wow, actually I like this idea.

You want to see all your spam trophies?

something like that..., but I was really thinking of something resembling the "Best of the Worst" of the last-man-standing reality genre (American Idol, Last Comic Standing, etc). It would be good fun to occasionally look at the list of flagged posts just like it's fun to occasionally poke fun at William Heng.

I'm sure he's writing it up as we type...but I would assume this is a "downvote" compromise.

Actually it's not related to the downvoting problem. I added it because spam submissions have been increasing.

Having both a downvote and "flag" on comments seems a bit too much. Nobody seems to spam the comments, and trolls get downvoted.

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