See the submissions you have flagged (maybe accidentally) | Hacker News Reader

See the submissions you have flagged (maybe accidentally)

news.ycombinator.com

98 pointssuperasn80 comments

Ok you guys, I hear you and will try to work on the confirmation thing soon.

dang, one other option (in addition to/instead of a confirmation):

Simply remove the link from the listing. This may work out better, anyway, to add at least one more click of friction to flagging (e.g. for people that may just flippantly/habitually flag stuff based on title alone).

This would also probably remove 99% of the accidental flags, since I’m guessing most happen from the listing vs. the thread.

And it would be easier! :)

That's a great suggestion, especially since it's how comment flagging works already (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag). Thanks!

All my flagged are by mistake. This is a UI issue for mobile. Flag and hide really should not be put next to discuss on the equal footing on the front page (the usage ratio should be more than 10x). I use discuss many times a day but never hide or flag. Maybe it is better to only show these on the discussion page (better for more thoughtful actions too, less incentive to flag without even having a chance of glancing the discussion).

Yeah. I had probably around 70 flagged submissions, and maybe 5 or 6 of them were on purpose. I read HN on mobile a lot, and didn't even notice that I accidentally flag things (although I know I accidentally hide things all the time, so it's not a surprise)

Me too. I unflagged all of them

I just checked and every one of mine are by mistake. Small suggestion for @dang and the dev team but you could put the flag behind a `confirm(...)`, it would be an extra click but would prevent posts from being erroneously flagged.

I have this site set to 125% on tablet, and I still misclick on shit all the fucking time. I only don’t bitch about it because Reddit is even worse.

24 pixels. Thats the minimum affordance suggestion by W3c (and it probably should be 32px IMO) for a click target on mobile if you don’t want to be the asshole. You make the padding clickable if the target is smaller than that.

> Undersized targets (those less than 24 by 24 CSS pixels) are positioned so that if a 24 CSS pixel diameter circle is centered on the bounding box of each, the circles do not intersect another target or the circle for another undersized target;

Also: the meaning of ”flag” isn’t obvious to me as non native (could this be for bookmarking a thread?) so a confirmation dialog explaining what it means could also ve helpful.

Same for me. I very rarely flag and I never thought I flagged accidentally but apparently I did in about two thirds of flagged submissions.

I am also never sure if I downvoted by accident or if downvotes are a thing here at all. Sometimes I see up and down arrows, but they are dangerously close on mobile and no matter where I touch they feel like one button anyway. I also could not find a way to see my downvotes, so I am not sure if downvoting is even possible.

EDIT: The up/down arrows work. If I touch the lower half the arrows disappear both and the comment does not appear in my upvoted list. I do get the option to "undown" however (as opposed to the usual "unvote").

My attempts hacking the upvoted comment list URL to find a downvoted list were not successful.

Sorry to parent comment, you were my guinea pig. I restored the upvote, hope the temporary downvote does not hurt.

Not important, but to whoever maintains this site, on mobile, on the front page of HN, the text goes right to the edge of the screen if the word break does not occur. A few px of padding would be nice!

Same here. Many use it as a mega downvote button to kill stories they don’t like.

Some dupe posts I flagged are missing last time I looked at it. Possibly working as intended. Comments from another section are missing from my account that I had wanted to save criticizing the moderating down-weight system too.

Me too. Not sure how it happened. The most recent is 2021 though.

Same here. I thought I hadn't flagged anything. Whoops. Unflagged now.

I wish there was a way to manually enable more friction for flagging. When I use the site on mobile I find it very easy to accidentally flag when I am trying to hide a post, a setting to enable a confirmation window would be quite useful to help prevent this.

I'm always accidentally hiding things while scrolling, which I only notice when I see something vanish with no obvious way to bring it back. Who knows how many other things I've done by accident that don't have obvious visual cues. Likewise, I'm always fat-fingering downvote when I mean to upvote, but at least nowadays there's an indicator of what you've done and a way to undo your vote (for a long time, there wasn't!).

> (for a long time, there wasn't!)

Back then I decided to never upvote anything, because hitting the wrong arrow was so easy and that I figured no votes was a better contribution to the site than frequently wrong direction votes!

It's fairly rare now that I accidentally click anything other than a (thankfully easy to reverse) up or down arrow, but I still 100% agree that anything like "hide" should be easily reversible.

I think flagging should be something done quite purposefully, maybe even at the cost of Karma and absolutely need a confirm("...")

and what currency that would be! make some successful shit posts and it gives you the privilege of silencing a political opponent in a debate! great fun

Better that than bestowing that power on newbies and sock puppets.

For an example implementation, downvoting in stackexchange costs you 1 point and takes 2 from the person being downvoted iirc (an upvote gets you nothing and bestows 10 points). You can only downvote if you've got a few points on the site, many fewer than on HN (the threshold here is 500 iirc). Flagging is always possible but afaik never leads to automatically killing the thing you're flagging, so downvoting is the way to downrank and fade out posts of people you disagree with. If you think this isn't a good system, it might be worth looking at how it works there, what the problems and benefits are and make a suggestion of what would be better

This and voting up/down are a pain on the mobile UI. It's too easy to downvote instead of upvote, or flag something without even noticing in this case. (I just found two perfectly normal posts I've flagged)

I think the main reason is the Web1.0 design of HN doesn't translate well to small screens.

Yes, I have 30% failure rate in mobile, even when pinching. I always now check for "undown" or "unvote".

Fwiw, there are some pretty great HN reader apps I’ve found — Hack and Octal are the two favorites I’ve come across for iOS.

I liked Slashdot's old moderation system, where you had a drop-down, and you at least had to choose from a few preset "reasons" for your moderation action. It's not perfect, but it might at least cause a few people to pause and reflect on why they feel such a strong urge to get rid of that headline.

For HN, you could map the drop-down contents directly to submission guidelines:

- Poor/incorrect title

- Non-original source

- Promotion/spam

- ...

I love that.

Especially when some things feel like they should have a low threshold for flagging (if 2 people agree it's obvious commerical spam, or terrible-quality content, or a duplicate submission from the past 48 hours), while others feel like they should have a higher threshold (e.g. if 5 people agree it's off-topic for HN, or a threshold proportional to upvotes).

I've also sometimes wanted to flag something for moderator attention, without wanting to give it a "strike". Like the discussion is worth keeping, but point to a better source or something. Your categories somehow solves that.

Dang did say this was on the todo list.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40958364

Like others in the thread, the first time I looked at my list of flagged submissions, there were 20+ just random things on there that I had obviously just fat-fingered on mobile.

This could be fixed with a single confirm().

Wow, around half of mine I accidentally flagged, I'm guessing.

Definitely feels like there ought to be some kind of confirmation required.

Especially when it only takes, what, 2 flags for something to be killed? (Or is it more, or does it depend on votes?)

I opened that page expecting maybe one or two accidental flags, since I thought myself to be quiet careful when looking at hn on mobile. Instead, it's more like 70% for me. I'll now try to make it a habit to check this page quite often, but this is just fighting the symptoms. I believe a confirmation popup or something similar would help a lot more.

Perhaps if you have anything flagged in past 48h, it says so with a top banner that shows flagged submissions?

> Especially when it only takes, what, 2 flags for something to be killed?

Feels like that's being gamed at the moment, certain topics are killed instantly.

The flag button sits right in the zone I swipe with my right thumb on mobile. Occasionally I notice and go unflag something. Clicking through this, I found several pages of posts I’ve flagged. I’d guess I’ve done no more than five posts intentionally. The rest were just the big dumb thumbs.

I wholeheartedly agree with the recommendation to add a confirmation to the action.

I had about 15 posts that I had apparently flagged for no deliberate reason. 0 were intentionally flagged - guess I also have mobile fat finger.

Also - submissions you have vouched for: https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched

And hidden https://news.ycombinator.com/hidden

(I literally just accidentally pressed hide on a post and was wondering how to un-hide it when I saw this post, nice coincidence!)

You can email HN to enable a hidden feature that hides the hide button/link. I've got it enabled because I never used the function anyway; it's much nicer not being able to accidentally hide things. Not sure why it's not on the profile page

It seems I have flagged quite a few things while dozing off to sleep reading HN in bed. Would these more impactful actions be better served with a confirmation? Even a prompt would do

Folks with trouble hitting the little links and arrows on mobile: reverse-pinch to zoom works great on HN. Make the arrows huge on the screen and it’s easy to hit the one you want.

Reverse pinch to zoom? What you mean? I can only zoom in.

That's exactly what they mean: reverse pinch to zoom in.

See: https://i.sstatic.net/2BDFS.png [1]

Reverse pinch == "Unpinch" in the image above.

[1] Original is at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49439378/google-chrome-d...

Does nothing here, perhaps browser/device specific?

I can see dozens, maybe hundreds,q of submissions that were all flagged accidentally. I wish Hacker News paid a minimum of attention to UX on small touchscreens.

Thank you for sharing. I had three perfectly normal flagged posts I don’t recall flagging

Any type of "wrong think" on my account gets flagged these days, makes commenting on debates pointless. I said this about SpaceX vs Nasa and my comment got flagged:

"SpaceX has shown us that private enterprise is the way. Giant decades long projects are slow, stifled by bureaucracy, and less effective."

This was in a political post about Nasa gets their budget cut, a political position I support with the above rational.

This is a big problem with the flag system - it constantly gets abused as a "I hate this person's opinion" button. It's very common to see comments flagged to death simply because they expressed an unpopular opinion (especially about politics), even though the comments are perfectly polite and on-topic for the thread. I keep show dead on and vouch for comments when I see they have been shouted down in this way, but unfortunately the user behavior is deeply ingrained and unlikely to go away.

i downvote comments that some might interpret as “i disagree with this” downvoting, but in reality, i downvote comments that shoehorn in a contentious opinion only loosely related to the topic, usually because the commenter has an axe to grind. i also downvote comments that feel astroturf-adjacent—those that echo a common but tiresome sentiment, especially when it’s not well-founded in facts but instead regurgitated as a talking point pushed by billionaire-owned corporate media to an audience that doesn’t always critically examine the narratives being fed to them.

i want HN to have curious and interesting conversation founded in objective facts. the previously desscribed style of commenting is not that, so i will downvote it

I notice downvote button isn’t always available on some of the debate-y threads. Sometimes the reply button isn’t available for some time too. I assume high response velocity is more so enabling arguements to take place, like happens on Reddit more commonly. Anyways, I wonder if you’re being flagged in absence of a downvote function/button being available.

I need smaller fingers

There has been a lot of flagging lately. Of my recent submissions there are a couple expected flags (subjects that tend to descend into uncivilised discussions - Musk, DOGE, Tesla), but also some very harmless ones as well (one about Apple’s Severance online series-related goodies).

I keep accidentally tapping "flag". This is a good reminder but I do occasionally go back and unflag them. My bigger concern is that the act of flagging does something that's not just being flagged.

For those wanting better mobile UX. There is an iOS app called “HACK” which I’ve been using happily for years.

Wow I've never flagged anything but there are 24 items in there! Would be good to have a confirm()

The most satisfying thing is flagging something and seeing it go [flagged][dead]

If I flag a comment (or submission), does that immediately flag it for everyone, or must it reach some threshold of flags before that happens? I’ve always assumed the latter.

Nevertheless, flagging is a tool I make sure to use only if a comment is a personal attack against someone, or a story (in the New view) whose content doesn’t match its headline. For most other scenarios, either moving on and ignoring it or perhaps downvoting it is enough.

I actually had one 8-/ and I never flag (intentionally).

Flagging is for trolls...

Incidentally I saw this post also flavged

Yes, most of mine are accidental as I very rarely flag anything deliberately. ~10/year looks like.

2 per 4 years here (and 1 accidental). I don't really see a reason to flag most submissions. What kinds of things do you, or should we, flag?

My understanding is that flags are for moderator attention (with an automatic system for if people pile flags on the same thing). I'm not sure I see many of those among the submissions, one of the two flags I put was a title that was leading to a mislead and pointless discussion and only a moderator can fix that

I meant, it looks like I accidentally flag ~10 per year. Real flags similar to you.

Obviously spam needs to be flagged. People who are kind enough to do the work of looking at /newest for the rest of us will use it a lot.

I've been flagging all posts I see related to politics. I understand politics and popular tech are now intertwined, but I still find it annoying to see it on a forum dedicated to hackers, startups, hobbyists, and makers.

Flagging is supposed to be for rule breaking, not to be used as some sort of mega-downvote for things you really don't like. If you don't want to read an article, why not just use the "hide" feature or move along to the next row?

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics.[0]

I guess if GP had said "I've been flagging most posts I see related to politics" that would be fine.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"About politics" is kind of vague. It's not like an article is either political or it's not. If you saw these headines at the top of HN, which of these would you consider "too political" and worthy of flagging?

- "Funding for NASA's next science mission in question"

- "A deep dive into the IRS's legacy computer systems"

- "State governors band together to propose new cyber-security rules"

- "UK government again takes aim at encryption"

- "List of IT systems DOGE staff members have access to"

Are all of these things just not-discussable here anymore, merely because they brush up against a government or politics?

Well there are two qualifiers there:

>unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

and

>If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic

Going off these, I would say "A deep dive into the IRS's legacy computer systems" is clearly fine, and the others could be considered questionable to varying degrees. I think it's fair to say that a news update should not automatically be considered an interesting new phenomenon because almost by definition all TV news will have some new element to it, and that is expressly labeled as "probably off-topic."

(For the record https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged shows zero entries for me.)

That's correct. I use the tagphrase "political overlap" to post about this, so there's a trail of past explanations about how we handle this here (if anyone doesn't already know, and wants to):

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

More than annoying, this forum has repeatedly shown that it is incapable of holding a civil discussion about politics. Every thread about politics quickly descends into a flame war. After many, many examples I am quite convinced that politics should be a banned topic on HN because of the negative effect these threads have on the community.

I don’t love it myself, but I find this community to be like minded enough, and dissimilar enough to any I’ve ever encountered IRL. Due to that, I don’t mind seeing how other people here feel about certain things. We live in a rapidly changing political climate and at times I just need to know how other sane people feel about the situations. It might be US centric, for that I could see how it’s exhausting for outsiders, but this community skews that way so it makes sense.

For the most part, debating different opinions in this community still feels productive and I have not seen too many times where it’s completely devolved to indecency

I say that as a moderate/liberal Texan which tends to put me in the ultra far right compared to some of the more Bay Area/California liberal centric ideologies that I’ve seen dominate here

dang recently replied to a comment i made with similar sentiment, and i understand his perspective:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993714

I just flag everything that has LLM/AI in the title. Technology is just too "magical" and reporting about it repetitive, to be interesting to read about anymore, or to learn something from that would be useful to me. Also, why should I not suppress something that's trying to eventually replace my job? :)

Then everything from big news websites or local american news websites. I don't care about the US anymore, nor what journalists there think about the world.

And then anything that comes from any of the big companies. Google, Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Apple, etc. They don't need any more attention that they already get and I don't use any of their services anyway, to care about their announcements.

This works well for streamlining the process, since there can be a lot of LLM stuff at any given day:

        // ==UserScript==
        // @name        Flaghider
        // @namespace   Violentmonkey Scripts
        // @match       https://news.ycombinator.com/*
        // @grant       none
        // @version     1.0 
        // @author      -   
        // @description 7/13/2024, 9:03:34 PM
        // ==/UserScript==

        let lastEl;
        document.addEventListener('mousemove', ev => {
          let el = ev.target.closest('.athing');
          if (lastEl) lastEl.style.backgroundColor = ''; 
          lastEl = el; 
          if (lastEl) lastEl.style.backgroundColor = '#fcc';
        }); 

        function wait(ms) {
          return new Promise(res => setTimeout(res, ms));
        }   

        window.addEventListener('keydown', async ev => {
          if (ev.key == 'b' && lastEl) {
            let el = lastEl.nextElementSibling;
            let hide = Array.from(el.querySelectorAll('a')).find(e => e.textContent == 'hide');
            let flag = Array.from(el.querySelectorAll('a')).find(e => e.textContent == 'flag');

            localStorage.setItem('scroll', document.body.scrollTop);

            hide.click();
            await wait(300);
            location.href = flag.href;
          }   
        }); 


        document.body.scrollTop = localStorage.getItem('scroll');

I hope dang and the HN software have tools for detecting this kind of abuse of flagging. I don't care for the constant stream of LLM articles either, but they aren't breaking any site rules. Just move along and read the next article.

Seriously, this is complete abuse of the flag tool, end of story.

I do hope megous's flags are ignored by HN and they're just wasting their time.

None of the things described are off-topic for HN. If you don't like them, don't read them. Flagging is not supposed to be for imposing your personal reading preferences on others. Wow.

"Abuse". Have you ever looked at what kind of stuff gets [flagged] on this website. It's clearly a [de-facto] tool for selecting what you like, and not for marking abuse. Ton of stuff that's not abusive at all gets flagged by so many people that the submission itself gets killed.

And I'll absolutely continue to use it for that. I like creative and technically investigative stuff, and flagging the rest is a way to steer this website in that direction.

Maybe upvoting would work too, if SN ratio would not be so low. But that's more work, because it can't be combined with hide function, so after upvoting, the noise stays visible.

You’re supposed to use the hide button for this.

I use both. See the extension code.

I wonder how many others are doing this? If I even mention AI in a comment it usually gets instant downvotes, regardless of whether I am speaking positively or negatively about it.

I'm pretty sure the right to flag is taken away from an account when it is used too frequently. Maybe they even do it shadowban-style and your flagging already does nothing.

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