I took a look at my profile the other day and realized that I'd somehow inadvertently flagged a bunch of posts and comments. Guessing it was a UI thing, trying to hit 'context' instead of flag.
There is a major temporal component to posts, comments, and flagging. I am not sure what good comes from unflagging my mistakenly flagged items when they are usually at least days old by the time I notice.
Considering the gravity of that particular mechanic, I would argue that something along the lines of the "are you sure?" prompt used in the delete action would be really helpful.
Related issue: it's too easy to accidentally mix up the upvote and downvote actions, because the buttons are close together and the visual feedback after the fact is pretty subtle. This is particularly bad on mobile.
That's what I thought. If you don't mind taking a moment, is there any rational reason by your reading why the linked article would deserve multiple flags on HN?
This may be conspiratorial thinking on my part, but if I was part of an influence voting ring, I would want to make this type of article disappear. If that's the case then the voting (flagging) ring might have just outed themselves to the admins, no?