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Comment by TheFreim | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 could be fixed with a single confirm().

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.

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.

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