It's a useful addition, if only to check occasionally that I haven't mistakenly flagged a comment or a submission.
I didn't really go in with an expectation, certainly not for that kind of amazing responsiveness and turnaround time. Thanks, dang!
It also seems like flagging an article now no longer hides it, which is extra great since the unflag link is right there without even needing to visit the profile to undo a mistap.
I have just unflagged all of them, hopefully It helps
I probably downvoted 20% of the time I tried to upvote until I realized I need to pinch-zoom super close and pay attention to the "on clicked" look of the link for the few milliseconds it appears.
Those arrows are not mobile friendly.
Flagging could do with a confirmation prompt perhaps.
there was some stuff I definitely meant to flag like spam or whatever but definitely some stuff that was not supposed to be
I think a free-form text input for reason would be nice. No one even has to read the reason most of the time.
Providing a reason for flagging serves multiple purposes:
- makes it so that you don’t accidentally flag something when you don’t mean to
- discourages overly aggressive flagging
- in some cases the reason for flagging might be more subtle. So casual review of flagged posts by mods might miss the subtle reason it is being flagged by people. If we explicitly state the reason, it can help mods see why a post is being flagged by people in such situations
I recently posted a tweet from pg [0] and as it starts getting some momentum, suddenly got flagged by someone who believes it is paywalled because Twitter rolled out the must-be-logged-to-view feature. It got unfairly flagged despite I provided the full tweet as a comment.
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Is it really unfair? Your link isn't accessible to a non-insignificant portion of the HN audience, therefore it seems reasonable to flag it.
It isn't reasonable to expect/force people to read comments before flagging content for being inaccessible.
My 3 pages of flagged submissions seems a bit more random. Perhaps I don't remember the reason just skimming through, but some of them are certainly accidental.
For comments, I usually only flag when people are egregiously violating site guidelines or are just being dicks in general, and I think most other potential flaggers often agree with my flags in those cases, and pile on. If I just think that a comment doesn't add anything substantive, I'll merely downvote.
I'll also downvote if I strongly disagree with someone's position, after reading an older post on HN from pg saying that's an accepted use for downvotes[0]. I'm still somewhat torn on this, as I'm not sure a nearly 15-year-old post on policy (from someone who seems not to be much involved with HN these days) should still be considered authoritative, as community norms change over time. I also don't love that using downvotes to express disagreement also has the effect of hiding contrary opinions, which can often hold a lot of value. So I try to reserve my disagreement downvotes for cases where I believe I have evidence the poster is objectively wrong about what they're saying.
I'm not really a fan of dialogs in flow if it can be avoided, at least not without trying other indicators first, but I would agree some UX experimentation might be worthwhile. Like rather then have it simply go to "unflag", a two letter difference purely in gray, also have it turn bold/bright red for an hour? At least as an option? I just tried playing with the CSS and flagging/unflagging your post, and setting [unflag] to color:red;font-weight:bold makes a real difference without being obnoxious.
When you flag something, does it disappear immediately, or only if it's received enough flags to be killed? If the latter, then I think this is much less of a problem. Sure, you may have flagged it by accident, but if it was only one flag away from being killed, it'd probably end up getting intentionally flagged again by someone else soon enough.
I honestly thought they got removed but it looks like this isn't happening for me (at least not right away), unless it's the scenario you mention where it's only one away from being killed. I think I must have been conflating the behaviour for hide with flag.
There's a reason why the emergency services requires you to enter three digits when dialing. Sure it would be a smoother flow if you only had to press a single button or dial '9', but you'd also get a lot more butt dials.
I think it'd be great for the flag button to show a confirmation popup before actually flagging.
Designwise that's maybe not ideal, sure. But it is discoverable, consistent, and reliable, which in my view counts for more.
Right now `flag` is between the timestamp and `hide`, neither of which I ever click on for a story. I wonder if it used to be next to something I (and many others) clicked more often?
Edit: as stated in that post, you can also see your vouched items by accessing https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched
Apologies to posters that didn’t get the complete chance their submissions deserved.
Everything earlier than 2017 or so was straight up a mistake. I didn't know what "flag" did, so I must have clicked it to experiment back then and just never realized I kept the flag this whole time. I just undid those flags.
There were 3 or 4 submissions I actually flagged for real that I'll keep the flag on. A bunch of comments that I've flagged.
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This seems like a good feature, in practice, I seem to have a fair number of mistaken flags (albeit from earlier before I knew what the feature did). But even today I've got a few misclicks, perfectly normal topics I must have accidentally hit the "flag" button on that I really shouldn't have.
Not sure but here [1] are some of the other URL's on HN one could bookmark.
[1] - https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#public... [not my repo]
https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl/issues/14#issuecomm...
I also think either a confirmation dialog or "what's wrong?" input for the flag would be good.
(As a side note, I have seen many good comments being down voted too without any reason, but that's for another day probably :D )
I checked my profile and noticed a handful of accidental Flags this year alone.
Perhaps a confirmation dialog would solve it.
Is it saying that I flagged them?
edit, I see the unflag links now, which resolves that.
I did not expect to see so many comments (nearly all of them, ~2 hours into this post) referring to accidental flagging.
Whatever the reasons, I like the new links.
I'm always surprised when I see some submission flagged on purpose by others. They are often interesting stuff. I upvoted and commented some of them.
in that sense, it is somehow a benefit, to see more of what is tracked behind the scenes. It seems obvious that these simple values are easily used make profiles of profiles, in aggregate.
I really felt like it was a good tool to help curb people from posting useless throwaway comments.
Anyone know why this was removed?