Ask HN: Why do we have the "hide" button in HN | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do we have the "hide" button in HN

5 pointsszastamasta15 comments

Seriously, does anybody use that? I frequently misclick it on mobile when trying to open a discussion and have to through settings to unhide it. Do you have any interesting use case for it, that I'm missing?

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All: if you don't want the 'hide' links, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll switch them off for your account.

If there are enough requests like that, we'll make it a profile option, but I'm reluctant to add profile options because UI complexity.

I use it to hide the things that I know I'll never be interested in engaging with here (politics, mostly.) Also, when the site gets really focused on something I have limited interest in, such as crypto in recent history and LLMs now.

It helps declutter the site.

Another thought: It would be very cool if I could auto-hide things based on where the link goes. I'll never want to click on a twitter or youtube link, for instance, and it would be convenient if I could just make them not appear.

Some frontends can do this. Makes the site much more usable.

I frequently misclick it on mobile

It's a stochastic noprocrast mode, a free serendipitous productivity tool.

I use it to get rid of topics I don't care about. Mostly "XYZ person has died" threads I don't find interesting.

It helps if you read the front page a lot and want to remove things you've already looked at/discussed thoroughly.

A case could be made for only having it on the front page.

People look at other pages and things on other pages make it to the front page.

Sometimes an article will land on the front page and it will disgust me so much that I have no choice but to hide it. It’s either that or I will lose self-control and spray radioactive waste all over the people who are commenting inside the said article’s thread.

For this reason alone, it is useful.

You can also use it to bump stories from second page, especially if something you are not interested in is dominating the front page.

hide, "mutes" comments i have read or are off topic, leaving comments i wish to interact with, and minimizing fatfingers on those i dont.

Good call for posting this and asking this

Slightly unrelated: I wish there was an option to disable the brownie points or karma. I, for one, don’t really care about some arbitrary number, neither up nor down. It also encourages echo chamber ideas, as humans are biased towards them and might even mindlessly vote down or up when they think this is the majority opinion. That also leads to public manipulation. I think HN should get rid of it completely while keeping some hidden -or not- metrics on how an article should be popular or not.

There are extensions that take it off the top bar and you can likely also make your adblocker do it without too much trouble.

That's good to know, thanks! It would be better if it were built in though, as most of the time I am using a phone app, not the browser.

Agreed, I'd have it an option that's off by default (i.e. default topbar shows no karma), even. But you can probably bug the person who makes the phone app.

Of course, the purist solution is the one upthread - use the regular website on your phone and misclick 'hide' until there's no avoiding doing whatever chore you're avoiding after all.

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