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! :)
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;
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.
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.
For HN, you could map the drop-down contents directly to submission guidelines:
- Poor/incorrect title
- Non-original source
- Promotion/spam
- ...
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).
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.
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 the main reason is the Web1.0 design of HN doesn't translate well to small screens.
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?)
Feels like that's being gamed at the moment, certain topics are killed instantly.
I wholeheartedly agree with the recommendation to add a confirmation to the action.
(I literally just accidentally pressed hide on a post and was wondering how to un-hide it when I saw this post, nice coincidence!)
Reverse pinch == "Unpinch" in the image above.
[1] Original is at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49439378/google-chrome-d...
"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 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
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.
Flagging is for trolls...
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
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.
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
I guess if GP had said "I've been flagging most posts I see related to politics" that would be fine.
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 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.
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.