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Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

just unflag it if you flag it?

The problem is that the user experience is not "oops, I accidentally flagged an article, I should go unflag it."

The experience is more like "I clicked on a link to an article, but instead of loading the article, the HN page just reloaded. Now I have to scroll down to find it again... Hmm.. Where is it? Maybe it's moved to a different page...? What was I even looking for again? Oh well"

I often din't realize when I accidentally flag something with my big fingers; when I go to my flagged page later I am often surprised to see a few pages I have no memory of and no reason at all for flagging.

Just out of curiosity I cheked my list for flagged comments and posts. There are a few comments I flagged, and they've been marked dead, correctly.

But holy* I have so may flagged posts that the list doesn't fit on one page. The latest one is from 2024/03 and oldest one is from 2020/06 (maybe that's when I started owning an iPhone, but not sure). And I don't see any reason why I'd flag any of those submissions.

I think it's very likely that the order of the text/link below the story title (on the frontpage) is to blame. For example:

> nn points by xxxxx n hours ago | flag | hide | nnn comments

The fact that links 'n hours ago' and 'flag' are right next to each other makes it very easy to click on the 'flag' accidentally.

So a +1 from me to do something to fix this problem.

I haven’t flagged anything but just checked and yeah. Now unflagging the wrongly flagged.

I've been PSAs before on the front page with a reminder to check your flagged stories. I and others visited the link and were surprised to see how many stories I had fat-finger flagged. In fact I had never intentionally flagged a story yet the list was at least 10-15 long

Wow I checked mine and had about 20. I've never intentionally flagged a submission as far as I can remember and none of these were even close to flag worthy.

I've apparently flagged 6 articles and 1 post by accident.

That said, it's possible this is all accounted for in the system. Maybe the mods only get notified above some threshold and that threshold has been tuned to ignore the background noise of accidental flags. Adding a confirmation would lower the noise level, but perhaps not translate into any real benefit.

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