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