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Comment by jonahrd | Hacker News Reader

While we're at it, why is the 'hide' button so close to the submission link, with no confirmation?

I often accidentally click hide, have to navigate to my profile, click 'hidden', click 'un-hide' then have to go back to the front page and find the post again.

It could simply be replaced with an 'sure? yes / no' right before hiding and this problem would disappear.

Same goes for 'flag'. In fact, sometimes I'm not even sure if I've hidden or flagged the link and I have to check both.

View on HN

Please no confirmation prompts. Those are annoying when I am sure that I want to perform an action. I'd rather have an undo button after clicking.

I agree, no confirm, but the current undo procedure for hide is definitely painful and it's really easy to accidentally click.

On the other hand, maybe it's a feature. Lately I've taken the approach that if I hid it accidentally, it probably wasn't worth reading anyway. I'm learning to let it go.

There's a simple fix (from a UX perspective): when you click "hide", swap the button with "unhide" but don't actually hide the article until you refresh.

Would require updating the page with JS

Edit: HN does in fact have things that change without reload like voting, so I take that back, good idea

I frequently am unsure whether my fat finger tapped upvote or downvote on comments, and since they both disappear...well, I usually just tap "unvote" and do it again, but I'm still never really sure if I tapped the correct one since my finger is so much bigger than the buttons.

You can tell which one happened because the button will say "unvote" if you upvoted and "undown" if you downvoted.

Thank you for this tip! TIL. I almost never downvote, and apparently I've seldom actually misclicked, so I had no idea there was in fact a UI difference.

When I read it on my phone, I have to zoom in for any interaction with HN.

But I really wouldn't like it to become less dense. Or to have prompts.

Yeah I've flagged way more posts by accident than I have on purpose. It's a pain to go find and un-flag them.

I have a "flag" link between the submission link and the hide link.

  77 points by fodkodrasz 1 hour ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 42 comments

I guess thats a function of having enough karma to enable flagging. Doesn't solve your immediate issue though.

I think they mean the link above it, the actual outgoing link. So in your case it just adds another misclick vector.

I still don't understand the issue. Does OP have an extremely imprecise or very very low DPI mouse? I don't think I'd be able to accidentally misclick the link if I washed down three percocets with a fifth of vodka.

Maybe OP uses a smartphone and a mobile browser

Very easy to misclick on a mobile device, even an iPad.

Perhaps proving https://xkcd.com/1172/, that would be pretty disruptive to the way I use the hide button, as it's a good way to leave your cursor in the same spot and "dismiss" posts that I don't plan on reading one by one. Adding a confirmation, and therein forcing me to continuously move the mouse there and back, would completely break that.

I agree with it shouldn't be so near to the link though (and with the broader topic that it seems HN prides itself somehow on having bad UX instead of just simplicity -- albeit perhaps because we couldn't all agree what to change and how!).

I don't know why I'm even surprised, but this is very funny! Of course my "simple" solution has problems as well :)

Maybe something you could opt into though?

I wonder if someone wrote a blog post about the cost of adding options vs not for maintenance of some software in the long term.

Can keep the confirmation link in the same place as the hide link (e.g. make Sure clickable). Then it's just double click.

What hide and submit links are near each other? Submit at top of site... Hide in the individual post headers... Huh?

...oh do you mean the individual post's link in the timestamp? Right. But why are you clicking that? To copy link maybe?

It's only a few pixels (vertically) between the title of the link and the "hide" button.

Misclick when browsing on phone.

And the logout button right under my name so I accidentally push it on mobile 50% of the time. Still I don’t think it’ll ever change much which is kind of cool in a way

I think, it is weird that I have never ever clicked on any of items there;

   unvote | flag | hide | past | favorite

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