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Ask HN: When were flagged submissions/comments added to the profile page?

105 points by olvy0 3y ago

I noticed it just now in my status page. I'm fairly convinced it wasn't there last time I viewed it. It's a useful addition, if only to check occasionally that I haven't mistakenly flagged a comment or a submission.

LinuxBender 3y ago
When were flagged submissions/comments added to the profile page? Not sure but here [1] are some of the other URL's on HN one could bookmark. [1] - https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#public-urls-with-user-generated-content https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#public... [not my repo]
mschuster91 3y ago
Gotta be in the last 14 days. Wonder what the use is though, when looking at my reports I see a couple spam flags and a dozen utterly vile and down-greyed comments. Not sure why anyone would want to see what they have reported...
- Kiro 3y ago
  I often accidentally flag something (on mobile) and this helps me undo that.
scandox 3y ago
Well I just found out that somehow over the years I had flagged 30+ totally innocuous items. So I've unflagged them all. They were more like things I would have been interested in rather than upset by. So I guess I was flagging instead of favoriting or some such madness.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
Why does my own show 2 flagged submissions when I did not submit either of those things? Is it saying that I flagged them? edit, I see the unflag links now, which resolves that.
throwanem 3y ago
It was added on Wednesday, about three weeks after I emailed to ask for some amelioration of my occasional clumsiness with phone screens leading to a high rate of erroneously flagged stories. I didn't really go in with an expectation, certainly not for that kind of amazing responsiveness and turnaround time. Thanks, dang!
- doubled112 3y ago
  I was also shocked to see I had flagged quite a few articles, likely because of my own fat fingers.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    I knew I was doing it, I just hated that I couldn't fix it myself! It also seems like flagging an article now no longer hides it, which is extra great since the unflag link is right there without even needing to visit the profile to undo a mistap.
  - gota 3y ago
    Oh my god, I have flagged dozens. None on purpose. I have just unflagged all of them, hopefully It helps
    - throwanem 3y ago
      Judging by the reaction in this thread, I feel like it might noticeably lower the noise floor on the moderation queue!
    - pjot 3y ago
      Same here. I use the favorite button a lot and that it is next to flag, I assume this is most likely what’s happened
    - dageshi 3y ago
      Me too, like 20+ over the years. I had no clue I was misclicking. Some kind of confirmation would be a real good idea!
johtso 3y ago
All 10 on my flagged posts were accidents. Think this probably highlights a UX issue and the need for an "are you sure?" popup.
- komadori 3y ago
  Ditto I have accidently flagged 12 submissions without noticing (but no comments). This is in addition to the many times where I've noticed an accidental flagging and immediately unflagged it. In my case, it's entirely a consequence of reading HN on a phone.
- kelnos 3y ago
  I think a popup would be annoying and get in the way. A better option might be to highlight in some way (perhaps via a change in text color) items that you have flagged, so you can easily see that you may have made a mistake.
ed25519FUUU 3y ago
Wow great feature. Apparently I accidentally hit the “flag” button all of the time because every one of my flagged posts was an accident. Now I get to go through and unflag them all. Sorry about that whoever made the post!
amccloud 3y ago
Thanks for the tip. Every flag for me was accidental.
lumpa 3y ago
Nice to see it added, quite a lot of people found out they had fat finger flagged some content when I told HN about these (then) hidden pages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30253799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30253799 Edit: as stated in that post, you can also see your vouched items by accessing https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched
- deleted 3y ago
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howard941 3y ago
Happy to see the link to Hiddens. Sometimes I hide the wrong one and there was no way out.
IAmLiterallyAB 3y ago
I had 10, all of which were accidental. It's so easy to accidentally hit flag with this UI
mistrial9 3y ago
the list clearly includes actions from long ago, so this data was recorded, just not visible to the account holder in that sense, it is somehow a benefit, to see more of what is tracked behind the scenes. It seems obvious that these simple values are easily used make profiles of profiles, in aggregate.
code_duck 3y ago
Glad to hear I wasn’t the only one accidentally flagging submissions! I had about 20 on my list going back to 2011 and only 1-2 were legitimately flag-worthy. Far fewer comments, only 4, and of those only 1 was by error. However my account can still flag submissions, but I noticed recently I don’t have the ability to flag comments for whatever reason.
deleted 3y ago
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idlewords 3y ago
Flag 'em all; let dang sort them out.
faizshah 3y ago
@dang can we add more friction to the flag thing? Maybe just a yes/no after.
ratg13 3y ago
Tangentially related .. can we bring back average karma score or whatever it was? I really felt like it was a good tool to help curb people from posting useless throwaway comments. Anyone know why this was removed?
rmellow 3y ago
On mobile it's too easy to accidentally click Flag. I checked my profile and noticed a handful of accidental Flags this year alone. Perhaps a confirmation dialog would solve it.
wodenokoto 3y ago
Apparently I’ve flagged about 100 submissions since 2015, and I’d wager none were intentional. Apologies to posters that didn’t get the complete chance their submissions deserved.
skilled 3y ago
I have like 200+ flags and every single one has been intentional. I am not sure the accidental excuse applies here. You either flag something or you don’t.
- antoineMoPa 3y ago
  It's surprisingly easy to flag something by mistake while scrolling & browsing HN on iphone.
  - Jtsummers 3y ago
    Probably on Android as well. The "flag" link is right under my thumb as I scroll through the page.
- scandox 3y ago
  It's not an excuse. It's a fact. Just read this thread. Thousands of flags of totally innocuous material by accident by scores of users. Including myself. Or maybe you think I subliminally love flagging articles concerning improvements to the Python programming language...Which would be worrying.
- yongjik 3y ago
  I flagged the parent. Yes, intentionally.
eimrine 3y ago
Sometimes my comments get flagged, that is always a good lesson on what is possible to say in some abroad communities. In some areas of possible opinions I do not even receive a single downvote, but a flag and it is always instant. I have no opinion about the topic, just a little observation.
johnchristopher 3y ago
Jeez, I knew I sometimes misclicked but I have to do something about it.
gumby 3y ago
Wow, looks like I flagged several posts ver the years, 100% by accident.
dragontamer 3y ago
I just checked my flags. Everything earlier than 2017 or so was straight up a mistake. I didn't know what "flag" did, so I must have clicked it to experiment back then and just never realized I kept the flag this whole time. I just undid those flags. There were 3 or 4 submissions I actually flagged for real that I'll keep the flag on. A bunch of comments that I've flagged. ---------- This seems like a good feature, in practice, I seem to have a fair number of mistaken flags (albeit from earlier before I knew what the feature did). But even today I've got a few misclicks, perfectly normal topics I must have accidentally hit the "flag" button on that I really shouldn't have.
pmontra 3y ago
I'd like a setting to disable flagging. I saw that I accidentally flagged some submissions and unflagged then now. I probably upvoted many of them and flagged them instead of tapping the link on my phone. I'm always surprised when I see some submission flagged on purpose by others. They are often interesting stuff. I upvoted and commented some of them.
phkahler 3y ago
I had no idea I ever flagged a submission.
O1111OOO 3y ago
When I saw this post, I thought the new flagging links were added to help track biases from users. For example, there might be users on this platform that will flag anything that might be critical of their fav tech company or political ideology. I did not expect to see so many comments (nearly all of them, ~2 hours into this post) referring to accidental flagging. Whatever the reasons, I like the new links.
insin 3y ago
Since lots of people are accidentally flagging on mobile and I'm currently revisiting my Hacker News extension to add a Safari version, I'm adding something which will let you choose your preferred solution for this (hide the flag control or require a confirm): https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl/issues/14#issuecomment-1627906333 https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl/issues/14#issuecomm...
deleted 3y ago
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rendaw 3y ago
Am I the only one who doesn't have these links in my profile?
- akg_67 3y ago
  Link disappears if you don't have flagged submissions and comments. I had a few accidental flagged submissions, once I unflagged them, link disappeared.
arun-mani-j 3y ago
It's interesting to see how many people have flagged by mistake. I'm a relatively new user of HN and has been always shocked to see many good posts getting flagged. I also think either a confirmation dialog or "what's wrong?" input for the flag would be good. (As a side note, I have seen many good comments being down voted too without any reason, but that's for another day probably :D )
sethammons 3y ago
lots of calls for a pop up confirmation. Consider colors or bolding: click flag, it becomes bold and red.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

Hmm, I have flagged like 15-20 submissions, maybe 3 intentionally... A confirm dialog may help.

codetrotter 3y ago
I intentionally flag posts sometimes. I think a free-form text input for reason would be nice. No one even has to read the reason most of the time. Providing a reason for flagging serves multiple purposes: - makes it so that you don’t accidentally flag something when you don’t mean to - discourages overly aggressive flagging - in some cases the reason for flagging might be more subtle. So casual review of flagged posts by mods might miss the subtle reason it is being flagged by people. If we explicitly state the reason, it can help mods see why a post is being flagged by people in such situations
- redbell 3y ago
  > discourages overly aggressive flagging I recently posted a tweet from pg [0] and as it starts getting some momentum, suddenly got flagged by someone who believes it is paywalled because Twitter rolled out the must-be-logged-to-view feature. It got unfairly flagged despite I provided the full tweet as a comment. _______________ 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563683
  - plorkyeran 3y ago
    It may also have been flagged simply because pg tweeting yet again about Musk is one of the least interesting submissions possible.
  - tredre3 3y ago
    > It got unfairly flagged despite I provided the full tweet as a comment. Is it really unfair? Your link isn't accessible to a non-insignificant portion of the HN audience, therefore it seems reasonable to flag it. It isn't reasonable to expect/force people to read comments before flagging content for being inaccessible.
    - halfdan 3y ago
      I think you misread the latter part of the sentence - OP said they provided the raw text in a comment. This is no different than some other paywalled articles posted here where the first comment usually just links to the web archive for a non-paywalled version.
xoa 3y ago
>A confirm dialog may help. I'm not really a fan of dialogs in flow if it can be avoided, at least not without trying other indicators first, but I would agree some UX experimentation might be worthwhile. Like rather then have it simply go to "unflag", a two letter difference purely in gray, also have it turn bold/bright red for an hour? At least as an option? I just tried playing with the CSS and flagging/unflagging your post, and setting [unflag] to color:red;font-weight:bold makes a real difference without being obnoxious.
- kelnos 3y ago
  Another option would be to add more statuses. When a comment gets enough flags, it gets "[flagged]" added to the top of it. Perhaps something like "[you flagged]" could help.
  - nmstoker 3y ago
    I suppose you could change further aspects of the current behaviour, but the issue with that idea is that the flagged items disappear currently, so you wouldn't get to see the "[you flagged]" entry, unless you got to the comments page for it via some other means (eg jumping to it from your browser history)
    - kelnos 3y ago
      Ah, good call. I have "showdead" enabled, so I see flagged/dead entries, and didn't think of this. (I do actually often enough find dead comments that IMO deserve to be seen, and vouch for them.) When you flag something, does it disappear immediately, or only if it's received enough flags to be killed? If the latter, then I think this is much less of a problem. Sure, you may have flagged it by accident, but if it was only one flag away from being killed, it'd probably end up getting intentionally flagged again by someone else soon enough.
      - nmstoker 3y ago
        Sorry, I may have got this wrong! I honestly thought they got removed but it looks like this isn't happening for me (at least not right away), unless it's the scenario you mention where it's only one away from being killed. I think I must have been conflating the behaviour for hide with flag.
matsemann 3y ago
My 9-10 pages of flagged comments seem mostly good, almost all of them are dead and things I think I intentionally flagged. My 3 pages of flagged submissions seems a bit more random. Perhaps I don't remember the reason just skimming through, but some of them are certainly accidental.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
I would like the ability to disable flagging for my account. Too easy to accidentally flag when scrolling. Or perhaps only offer flagging when you’re on a thread or viewing an individual comment.