Tell HN: You can see your vouched and flagged items
109 comments
> It might be useful to catch flagging-by-fat-fingers. Also to take a look at how well items you vouch for do afterwards.
One area where HN has done poorly for years is accessibility, both on desktop (poor) and mobile (very poor). Most of the click and tap targets are quite small, and are spaced quite close to each other. Most of the fonts are quite small.
Unintentionally downvoting something when intending to upvote it (or vice versa), unintentional flagging of a post, etc., happen more often.
Isn’t there a web designer out there who can create a better (yet simple) CSS for HN to use and donate it? Isn’t YC capable of spending some pocket change on improving accessibility on one of its important sites? How about a design competition (with constraints) with the top five getting some reward and letting the users choose (in their profiles) which of these winning stylesheets they’d like to use? Or just allow a URL for stylesheet in the user profile so anyone has the freedom to customize it however they like?
One area where HN has done poorly for years is accessibility, both on desktop (poor) and mobile (very poor). Most of the click and tap targets are quite small, and are spaced quite close to each other. Most of the fonts are quite small.
Unintentionally downvoting something when intending to upvote it (or vice versa), unintentional flagging of a post, etc., happen more often.
Isn’t there a web designer out there who can create a better (yet simple) CSS for HN to use and donate it? Isn’t YC capable of spending some pocket change on improving accessibility on one of its important sites? How about a design competition (with constraints) with the top five getting some reward and letting the users choose (in their profiles) which of these winning stylesheets they’d like to use? Or just allow a URL for stylesheet in the user profile so anyone has the freedom to customize it however they like?
While click targets could be bigger, I very much appreciate the information density and vastly prefer HN's mobile design to any other mobile-"friendly" design for a forum I've used.
When designing UIs, an alternative to reducing misclicks is making undo easier. HN is already doing pretty well in this regard. Undo is easy; the biggest problem is that you might sometimes not realize you've performed an action. The only indication that you've flagged a story is that the word flag changes to unflag. If there was a more visible change, like changing the color of the story to red, adding strikethrough, and/or maybe a (short!) animation, that would go a long way toward mitigating the problem of unintentional flagging without requiring a big change in the design to increase the size of everything, reducing information density.
When designing UIs, an alternative to reducing misclicks is making undo easier. HN is already doing pretty well in this regard. Undo is easy; the biggest problem is that you might sometimes not realize you've performed an action. The only indication that you've flagged a story is that the word flag changes to unflag. If there was a more visible change, like changing the color of the story to red, adding strikethrough, and/or maybe a (short!) animation, that would go a long way toward mitigating the problem of unintentional flagging without requiring a big change in the design to increase the size of everything, reducing information density.
Here's a rough workaround in the form of a uBlock Origin filter, if this example benefits anyone:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%23%23%20ycombinator.com&type=...
# bigger arrows; wider gap between arrows
news.ycombinator.com##:xpath(//div[contains(@class,"votearrow")]):style(width: 15px !important; height: 15px !important; background-size: 15px !important; margin-bottom: 10px !important)
# larger comment toolbar
news.ycombinator.com##:xpath(//span[@class="comhead"]):style(font-size: 200% !important)
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%23%23%20ycombinator.com&type=...
PSA: For those of us on iOS/Safari, Stop The Madness recently added the ability to add site specific css or scripts https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/
I guess there are other apps(extensions) also that can do this with the new Safari extensions api I just happen to be a happy user of STM
I guess there are other apps(extensions) also that can do this with the new Safari extensions api I just happen to be a happy user of STM
I have to assume the reason that it hasn't been done is HN doesn't consider it a problem, from my viewpoint I just followed and I can see there are definitely a few flags I did not intentionally do. I have two pages of flags, I would say approximately a page worth is misflags.
on edit: I don't seem to have any misvouches so not sure why misflags would happen and not misvouches.
on edit 2: obviously misflags must happen more frequently because it is possible to flag any post, and misvouches can only happen if I accidentally vouch for something someone else has flagged which I wouldn't see that often. So I guess it is reasonable I have no misvouches but a page worth of misflags.
on edit: I don't seem to have any misvouches so not sure why misflags would happen and not misvouches.
on edit 2: obviously misflags must happen more frequently because it is possible to flag any post, and misvouches can only happen if I accidentally vouch for something someone else has flagged which I wouldn't see that often. So I guess it is reasonable I have no misvouches but a page worth of misflags.
> Isn’t there a web designer out there who can create a better (yet simple) CSS for HN to use and donate it?
Lets hire the Reddit or (iirc) SlashDot designers for the re-design ;-)
Lets hire the Reddit or (iirc) SlashDot designers for the re-design ;-)
Think whoever did the Digg v4 redesign should be a top candidate as well.
DIGG…. That was the site I couldn’t remember… Thanks.
This is especially a problem with the up/down vote buttons on mobile - they are tiny, and separated by a couple of pixels, so I pretty frequently notice I've accidentally hit the wrong one. I presume I don't notice what I've done far more often than I do.
To prove your point: the only post I've ever flagged was one of my own which I'm pretty sure was an accident click.
HN is one of the best designed websites I use daily. The information density is unmatched on the "modern" web.
So are you refuting the assertion that HN does a poor job with accessibility? Or just saying that you don't care because it works well for you?
I'm saying we shouldn't make things substantially worse for 95% of people just to make things marginally better for 5%. Usually "accessibility" on the web means adding 1em padding around everything so that I can only see one comment at time on my 39" monitor.
The parent comment mentioned CSS changes, but I basically think the appearance should stay the same, and any accessibility improvements can probably be accomplished by changing the HTML for better screen reader compatibility, if needed.
The parent comment mentioned CSS changes, but I basically think the appearance should stay the same, and any accessibility improvements can probably be accomplished by changing the HTML for better screen reader compatibility, if needed.
There’s more to accessibility than just supporting screen readers, though that’s what people seem to think of first.
Here’s a good starting point from Mozilla covering accessibility: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...
Here’s a good starting point from Mozilla covering accessibility: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...
Most of the advice on that page is about using the correct semantic HTML elements as well as aria annotations, which is what I had in mind. Basically the appearance should stay the same, but I can definitely see how fixing up the HTML could make the page more navigable by keyboard / screen reader / etc..
For one, HN could stop using gif tags for indenting the comments and use modern css instead.
It's one of the only sites which does this today.
It's one of the only sites which does this today.
HN is terrible to use on touchscreens (smartphones, tablets, certain laptops) and I wouldn't be surprised if more than 5% of HN's target audience are negatively affected by it. And I doubt that many people use 39 inch monitors, certainly not 95% of the target audience.
It's not the appearance. Load it on a mobile browser and you'll see what everyone is talking about. You wouldn't even have to change the desktop version. Just have a mobile option too. HN's layout is so deadpan simple is would be incredibly easy to build a mobile interface with a modern CSS framework.
I love HN and it works well for me, even on mobile and I'm seriously handicapped, including visually impaired.
It's also got known accessibility issues, including for people who are blind or otherwise more visually impaired than I am.
The lead mod has acknowledged this in comments.
It's also got known accessibility issues, including for people who are blind or otherwise more visually impaired than I am.
The lead mod has acknowledged this in comments.
At the risk of beating a dead horse to death (huh?), this is pretty abysmal. I understand it is, it was, it always will be, but c'mon. I can totally see hesitancy to change it, as whatever change will not make 100% of users happy and law of averages suggest a > 0% of users will be unhappy.
Sometimes, devil you know....
Sometimes, devil you know....
There are a ton of alternate HN UIs for web, mobile, and terminal. I don't use any but I've seen them posted about many times.
I lost the video a while back, then finally re-found it. Here's a blind person showing how Hacker News sounds over JAWS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c&t=386s
(Headphone warning: the volume is unfortunately all over the place, the screen reader is way too loud and the speaker volume is way too soft.)
TL;DR, the page design places so much emphasis on visual table layout that it doesn't incorporate a single <h1> or <h2> anywhere, and it is effectively impossible to read the site rapidly without unconditionally listening to all the
I just got mad and got JAWS working in demo/evaluation mode. Here's what blind users hear every time they visit HN:
This does not work with sites that do not have any headings - and HN has none.
You'd better not be blind and have ADHD! Not only do you have to listen to all the navigation cruft, you have to listen to the entire front page as a well of text and lean on working memory, because the lack of headings makes it nontrivial to pause/rewind.
Now, 75%+ of the material linked here can be expected to have a minimal level of reasonable common sense with regards to semantically-structured layout, so once you've left the link and title soup you can probably expect to listen to some proportion of articles and information in relative peace.
But hang on... what if you come to the site for the comments?
DUN DUN DUN
All I can say is... hopefully you don't have ADD either. Here's a portion of this thread as a blind user would hear it:
I'm honestly just confused at this point. I am extremely not interested in stepping over the ad hominem boundary here, but... it's clear there is an understanding of Web accessibility, and HN is, you know, the technology startup accelerator, and this is in the middle of the supposed tech capital of the world, so it's like... I look at Hanlon's razor (do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence/stupidity), and I go, well this is supposedly a place that focuses on optimizing for intelligence and "doing things correctly", in an incredibly detail-oriented industry, and I just... exploding brain moment :(
I did have a bit of an idea though. On the one hand the Silly Valley is all about "the next big idea" or "what's just around the corner", while it's well understood that SF municipality facilities (transport, city manglement, etc) are *well* underpar. Maybe, just maybe, that juxtaposition has an underdocumented impact on the culture of everyday living - focus on the inside, on your heart, on what could be, and remember that if you ignore how bad everything is, this is the key to being successful.
That's the only way I can explain the "this is how we do things here" situation in terms of the site design being what I would describe as pragmatic-to-a-fault.
With the above being said, I should point out that I incidentally happen to still be working out some pretty fundamental areas of personal equilibrium, and have a bit of an oversensitivity to invisibility and "it's fine, it's fine (narrator: it wasn't fine)" types of situations. So I have a bit of bias/lack of perspective in this area, and can't help not being a bit snappy when talking about it.
(Headphone warning: the volume is unfortunately all over the place, the screen reader is way too loud and the speaker volume is way too soft.)
TL;DR, the page design places so much emphasis on visual table layout that it doesn't incorporate a single <h1> or <h2> anywhere, and it is effectively impossible to read the site rapidly without unconditionally listening to all the
Hacker News. Page has 224 links. Hacker News visited Unlabeled graphic Graphic y18 link Hacker News link new vertical bar link past vertical bar link comments vertical bar link ask vertical bar link show vertical bar link jobs vertical bar link submit. link login
I just got mad and got JAWS working in demo/evaluation mode. Here's what blind users hear every time they visit HN:
Table with 3 columns and 61 rows. 1. link upvote link Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane left paren link nature.com right paren 115 points by link jnord link 1 hour ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 46 comments. 2. link upvote link Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition link vinepair.com right paren 131 points by link harambae link 4 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 42 comments. 3. link upvote link SoftBank’s Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO left paren link reuters.com right paren 126 points by link gaius_baltar link 4 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 24 comments. 4. link upvote link You can change your number left paren link signal.org right paren 508 points by link feross link 10 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 300 comments. 5. link upvote link Finding the average of two unsigned integers without overflow left paren link microsoft.com right paren 249 points by link mlex link 8 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 119 comments. 6. link upvote link IRS to ditch biometric requirement for online access left paren link krebsonsecurity.com right paren 328 points by link bonyt link 10 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 112 comments. 7. link upvote link KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE left paren link complete.org right paren 167 points by link jrepinc link 9 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 65 comments. 8. link upvote link Some mistakes Rust doesn’t catch left paren link fasterthanli.me right paren 118 points by link jacobwg link 6 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 17 comments. 9. link upvote link Flexbox Froggy – A game for learning CSS flexbox left paren link flexboxfroggy.com right paren 210 points by link mrzool link 9 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 21 comments. 10. link upvote link Ask HN: How to raise funds for rare disease research? 204 points by link halukakin link 10 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 127 comments.
This does not work with sites that do not have any headings - and HN has none.
You'd better not be blind and have ADHD! Not only do you have to listen to all the navigation cruft, you have to listen to the entire front page as a well of text and lean on working memory, because the lack of headings makes it nontrivial to pause/rewind.
Now, 75%+ of the material linked here can be expected to have a minimal level of reasonable common sense with regards to semantically-structured layout, so once you've left the link and title soup you can probably expect to listen to some proportion of articles and information in relative peace.
But hang on... what if you come to the site for the comments?
DUN DUN DUN
All I can say is... hopefully you don't have ADD either. Here's a portion of this thread as a blind user would hear it:
link left bracket dash right bracket I have to assume the reason that it hasn’t been done is HN doesn’t consider it a problem, from my viewpoint I just followed and I can see there are definitely a few flags I did not intentionally do. I have two pages of flags, I would say approximately a page worth is misflags. on edit: I don’t seem to have any misvouches so not sure why misflags would happen and not misvouches. link reply link upvote link benrbray link 2 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket HN is one of the best designed websites I use daily. The information density is unmatched on the "modern" web. link reply link upvote link alksjdalkj link 2 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket So are you refuting the assertion that HN does a poor job with accessibility? Or just saying that you don’t care because it works well for you? link reply link upvote link DoreenMichele link 2 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket I love HN and it works well for me, even on mobile and I’m seriously handicapped, including visually impaired. It’s also got known accessibility issues, including for people who are blind or otherwise more visually impaired than I am. The lead mod has acknowledged this in comments. link reply link upvote link guiseroom link 2 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket To prove your point: the only post I’ve ever flagged was one of my own which I’m pretty sure was an accident click. link reply link upvote link smt88 link 4 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket There are a ton of alternate HN UIs for web, mobile, and terminal. I don’t use any but I’ve seen them posted about many times. link reply link upvote link dylan604 link 4 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket At the risk of beating a dead horse to death (huh?), this is pretty abysmal. I understand it is, it was, it always will be, but c’mon. I can totally see hesitancy to change it, as whatever change will not make 100% of users happy and law of averages suggest a > 0% of users will be unhappy. Sometimes, devil you know.... link reply link upvote link jb1991 link 1 hour ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket Indeed I spend a significant amount of time undoing whatever I accidentally clicked. link reply link upvote link opportune link 3 hours ago link left bracket dash right bracket Wow I seem to fat finger the flag button a lot. Surprised my flagging privileges have not been revoked (or maybe they silently have). Maybe it makes sense for HN to lower the weight of flags based on the user-agent, since I assume all of these are from me using mobile link reply link upvote link shaunxcode link 6 minutes ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket Same! Almost NONE of them are ones I intentionally flagged! link reply link upvote link superasn link 1 hour ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar
I'm honestly just confused at this point. I am extremely not interested in stepping over the ad hominem boundary here, but... it's clear there is an understanding of Web accessibility, and HN is, you know, the technology startup accelerator, and this is in the middle of the supposed tech capital of the world, so it's like... I look at Hanlon's razor (do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence/stupidity), and I go, well this is supposedly a place that focuses on optimizing for intelligence and "doing things correctly", in an incredibly detail-oriented industry, and I just... exploding brain moment :(
I did have a bit of an idea though. On the one hand the Silly Valley is all about "the next big idea" or "what's just around the corner", while it's well understood that SF municipality facilities (transport, city manglement, etc) are *well* underpar. Maybe, just maybe, that juxtaposition has an underdocumented impact on the culture of everyday living - focus on the inside, on your heart, on what could be, and remember that if you ignore how bad everything is, this is the key to being successful.
That's the only way I can explain the "this is how we do things here" situation in terms of the site design being what I would describe as pragmatic-to-a-fault.
With the above being said, I should point out that I incidentally happen to still be working out some pretty fundamental areas of personal equilibrium, and have a bit of an oversensitivity to invisibility and "it's fine, it's fine (narrator: it wasn't fine)" types of situations. So I have a bit of bias/lack of perspective in this area, and can't help not being a bit snappy when talking about it.
I think the reasons are pretty simple. HN is focused around tech folk & they are expected to write or use other frontends or tweak the output themselves. Also I get the feeling that no one wants to touch the working code to rewrite it. What's the incentive? It works and is lightweight. The number of people complaining is just not big enough. They probably don't have a dedicated dev because the site is that simple, and they want to keep it that way.
They are simple, they're just disappointing.
It's definitely simpler to completely ignore accessibility. It's also a bad thing.
It's easier to not put a ramp at my shop, after all there aren't that many people in wheelchairs. It's easier to not add induction loops to help those with hearing aids, after all there aren't that many people with them.
We can keep going with this logic. Facial recognition only works with white faces? But most of my users are white, let's just keep it.
It's easier to exclude people. Across society, that ends up pretty poorly, particularly when it's the same groups that are excluded time and time again.
> What's the incentive?
It would be nice if making the content work for people with accessibility requirements was a reward in itself, but this is why we end up with laws, to make not doing these things a punishable offence so that in the end it's easier to actually do them.
It's definitely simpler to completely ignore accessibility. It's also a bad thing.
It's easier to not put a ramp at my shop, after all there aren't that many people in wheelchairs. It's easier to not add induction loops to help those with hearing aids, after all there aren't that many people with them.
We can keep going with this logic. Facial recognition only works with white faces? But most of my users are white, let's just keep it.
It's easier to exclude people. Across society, that ends up pretty poorly, particularly when it's the same groups that are excluded time and time again.
> What's the incentive?
It would be nice if making the content work for people with accessibility requirements was a reward in itself, but this is why we end up with laws, to make not doing these things a punishable offence so that in the end it's easier to actually do them.
> [tech folk] are expected to write or use other frontends or tweak the output themselves
Weird how that expectation only seems to apply to tech folk using assistive technologies. I'm sighted and while I think HN is needlessly ugly and user hostile in some places the only thing I need to do to use it is zoom in a bit. But I guess that just means I'm more technically adept than someone who has to mess around with their screen reader or crawl through the pile of poorly maintained "UIs" to make the site work.
> It works and is lightweight.
That's quite the response to someone demonstrating that it doesn't work.
Weird how that expectation only seems to apply to tech folk using assistive technologies. I'm sighted and while I think HN is needlessly ugly and user hostile in some places the only thing I need to do to use it is zoom in a bit. But I guess that just means I'm more technically adept than someone who has to mess around with their screen reader or crawl through the pile of poorly maintained "UIs" to make the site work.
> It works and is lightweight.
That's quite the response to someone demonstrating that it doesn't work.
Unfortunately the major thing stopping me from doing precisely that is that login is fundamentally not straightforward: there's no API for it, so you have to go through the website... which is behind CloudFlare, and thus is effectively not reliably scriptable. So, every wannabe alternative frontend is not only required to demand your actual HN username and password, it's effectively impossible for anything other than something like a phone app or browser extension to actually pull everything off, because you need to host a webview for the user to login into to ensure you get past the CF wall and then capture both the login cookies and CloudFlare's cookies. And then the API doesn't expose certain site functionality such as showing dead comments or indicating when something has been heavily downvoted, so the only reliable way to provide feature parity is to ScRaPe ThE hTmL, yayyy.
The only way I can see to fix this is to enable something like OAuth2, which would be a fairly significant departure from HN's brand of minimalism.
My understanding is that dang both moderates the site and maintains the codebase. I've seen new functionality slowly pop up over time; the site is definitely in a slow-but-steady state of continuous development. You may have a point in terms of noone wanting to touch the codebase in specific places (like the voting logic), but I can't see semanticity improvements being too difficult - at least, my surface expectation is that it shouldn't be too hard. It's possible the Arc code specifically powering HN is a giant spaghetti mess.
The incentive perspective is also a very good point. IMHO this is one of those things that's high-effort, high-QoL-improvement, yet low-*perceived*-impact. I'm still trying to figure out what to call it. Whatever it is, it's really hard to straightforwardly make the point that this functionality is absolutely worth investing in, very sadly. It's just one of those things that just doesn't pop out in an... obvious way, for want of a better way to put it. And it's an absolute shame.
The only way I can see to fix this is to enable something like OAuth2, which would be a fairly significant departure from HN's brand of minimalism.
My understanding is that dang both moderates the site and maintains the codebase. I've seen new functionality slowly pop up over time; the site is definitely in a slow-but-steady state of continuous development. You may have a point in terms of noone wanting to touch the codebase in specific places (like the voting logic), but I can't see semanticity improvements being too difficult - at least, my surface expectation is that it shouldn't be too hard. It's possible the Arc code specifically powering HN is a giant spaghetti mess.
The incentive perspective is also a very good point. IMHO this is one of those things that's high-effort, high-QoL-improvement, yet low-*perceived*-impact. I'm still trying to figure out what to call it. Whatever it is, it's really hard to straightforwardly make the point that this functionality is absolutely worth investing in, very sadly. It's just one of those things that just doesn't pop out in an... obvious way, for want of a better way to put it. And it's an absolute shame.
Wow I seem to fat finger the flag button a lot. Surprised my flagging privileges have not been revoked (or maybe they silently have). Maybe it makes sense for HN to lower the weight of flags based on the user-agent, since I assume all of these are from me using mobile
Yeah I couldn't believe my flagged profile. I really think a yes/no double confirm could prevent a lot of these.. also since it's such a rarely used feature I don't think anyone would mind confirming it.
I was surprised, too! Then I went back to the front page and noticed the “flag” link is usually right around where my thumb goes when scrolling the page on mobile.
Same. I've never intentionally flagged a story I don't think but had a dozen or so that I guess I fat fingered
As someone who never intentionally has flagged anything, I expected to see maybe three... but saw 19, ugh.
I've flagged 6. Oops. I didn't even know I could flag posts. Now I'm worried I ruined someone(s) day unintentionally.
Same, I found many false flags.
Same! Almost NONE of them are ones I intentionally flagged!
Yikes, same, I had so many.
I have way more flagged than I expected.
Sorry! Apparently I click it in error more than I realized.
Gonna go fix it. Too late, I know, but then I start fresh and can be aware.
Sorry! Apparently I click it in error more than I realized.
Gonna go fix it. Too late, I know, but then I start fresh and can be aware.
Yeah, the tap targets on mobile are tiny
same here, I don't think I've ever flagged anything on purpose.
I have, but literally two items. I was first, or super early enough to have an opportunity to flag.
Usually, it is flagged before I show up.
A simple, "Flag for realz, no?" Might be a net win. But, it would also break the lean and mean, oh so sweet UX here too.
Usually, it is flagged before I show up.
A simple, "Flag for realz, no?" Might be a net win. But, it would also break the lean and mean, oh so sweet UX here too.
I had created a list of endpoints on Hacker News to help with my extension Refined Hacker News (https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news/blob/maste...). Thanks for telling me about this! Will add these paths too :)
Thanks! I read NH on my phone and I often press one of the wrong buttons by accident. The worst is "hide" - I end up swearing I saw something and then I can't find it, and it never occurs to me to check my hidden list.
I read HN about 50/50 on desktop vs mobile, and deliberately stay logged out on mobile so that I don't accidentally vote up/down. I tend to not hit hide just because I scroll on the left side of the screen, but staying logged out doesn't protect against that.
Wow, I found over a two dozen flagged comments and I have never purposely flagged a comment.
Interesting! Thanks for posting this. I am cleaning up my giant mess. The data seems to indicate that there is something lacking in the UI, but I'm still not sure exactly what. What was I trying to tap when I hit flag? I am nearly 50/50 mobile/desktop, hmmm.
What a terrible SNR I've been giving dang et al. Sorry!
Edit: yeah, it’s likely just scrolling on mobile and accidentally tapping Flag. What’s a bit odd is that my Hidden list is empty. Why wasn’t I accidentally tapping that sometimes?
Interesting! Thanks for posting this. I am cleaning up my giant mess. The data seems to indicate that there is something lacking in the UI, but I'm still not sure exactly what. What was I trying to tap when I hit flag? I am nearly 50/50 mobile/desktop, hmmm.
What a terrible SNR I've been giving dang et al. Sorry!
Edit: yeah, it’s likely just scrolling on mobile and accidentally tapping Flag. What’s a bit odd is that my Hidden list is empty. Why wasn’t I accidentally tapping that sometimes?
The name itself could be part of it: "Flag" could mean anything. In my E-mail, I "flag" things that I want to read again and take action on. Back when I was an HN newbie, I thought that's what flags here were for. There is nothing in the name "flag" that indicates it should be used to mark naughty posts.
In my case, I was aware of HN downvoting and flagging prior to having those rights, so I was not misusing them for sure.
Apparently I flagged a story in 2017. Pretty sure not intentional.
Still, please don't turn HN into one of those mobile friendly sites with information density approaching zero.
Still, please don't turn HN into one of those mobile friendly sites with information density approaching zero.
> Still, please don't turn HN into one of those mobile friendly sites with information density approaching zero.
I would also be extremely conservative with any changes to this website.
I love that it loads very quickly over 2G data and that my blockers don’t block anything on it. I also do appreciate the consistency of the design over the years.
I grok the glacial pace of progress on HN. I’d still be curious to know exactly why this wasn’t taken care of in the UI. Seems so noisy for any mods.
Does it just not matter? Did they just stop paying attention to mobile flags internally? But then it’s kinda messy to leave them visible for me. Hmmm.
I would also be extremely conservative with any changes to this website.
I love that it loads very quickly over 2G data and that my blockers don’t block anything on it. I also do appreciate the consistency of the design over the years.
I grok the glacial pace of progress on HN. I’d still be curious to know exactly why this wasn’t taken care of in the UI. Seems so noisy for any mods.
Does it just not matter? Did they just stop paying attention to mobile flags internally? But then it’s kinda messy to leave them visible for me. Hmmm.
I documented a bunch of hidden links here:
https://gist.github.com/jakub-g/803ad2c074ad1fbe2af5
Re: "vouching", what is this? Is it to un-dead something?
I have also a question about flagging: What's the etiquette for this? I sometimes use it as "I want dang to read the comment, and take the action that it suggests to take" (like: change the title etc.), rather than: "there is something wrong with this post".
Re: "vouching", what is this? Is it to un-dead something?
I have also a question about flagging: What's the etiquette for this? I sometimes use it as "I want dang to read the comment, and take the action that it suggests to take" (like: change the title etc.), rather than: "there is something wrong with this post".
> Re: "vouching", what is this? Is it to un-dead something?
If you have "showdead" on (check your settings) you can vouch a comment that has been flagged to death.
If you have "showdead" on (check your settings) you can vouch a comment that has been flagged to death.
> "I want dang to read the comment, and take the action that it suggests to take"
That's why dangs email address is in the footer.
That's why dangs email address is in the footer.
In case anyone else was wondering, these are only visible to you.
Just fixed a few random misclicks I had no idea about, this was quite useful. These should really be linked on the user's own profile page.
There is a leaderboard. https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders It does not include mods though.
I try vouch for people who get hammered by fanboys and shills in submarine advertisement threads because that's something (I believe) that happens to me a lot and I hope they notice!
What does submarine mean in this context?
Sneaky and under the radar. An advertorial.
"a newspaper or magazine advertisement giving information about a product in the style of an editorial or objective journalistic article."
"a newspaper or magazine advertisement giving information about a product in the style of an editorial or objective journalistic article."
What! I've flagged about one article a month accidentally - should this feature have an "are you sure"?
I know I occasionally downvote posts rather than minimize but usually notice that.
I know I occasionally downvote posts rather than minimize but usually notice that.
Hmm, it seems I unintentionally flag as well (about 5 posts in total).
I also remember to have intentionally flagged a few posts, but I don’t recognize them.
I don’t understand this view fully.
I also remember to have intentionally flagged a few posts, but I don’t recognize them.
I don’t understand this view fully.
It's actually pretty hard to unintentionally flag a comment because it takes two separate clicks. Flagging articles unintentionally is easier.
I’m careful. I often catch myself and fix downs I don’t intend. Yet I found a bunch of flags, and only two real ones.
Check for yourself, you might be surprised.
Check for yourself, you might be surprised.
Wow, I've flagged way more posts unintentionally than I would have guessed.
Very useful indeed. I found 8 articles which I flagged by mistake...
I read this option to mean a totally different thing: That it showed which of my own posts were flagged by others, but that is not the case.
I read this option to mean a totally different thing: That it showed which of my own posts were flagged by others, but that is not the case.
Interesting - just looked at the things I've upvoted and they're mostly fat fingered items...
If more people report the same thing, it might be worth improving the UI a little.
If more people report the same thing, it might be worth improving the UI a little.
I seem to remember dang saying that flagged items were anonymous?
Maybe I'm mis-remembering, as clearly they can't be if they're stored somewhere on a per-user basis...
Maybe I'm mis-remembering, as clearly they can't be if they're stored somewhere on a per-user basis...
They're probably anonymous in the same way downvotes are. The relation is stored on the system, but users can't see it. Otherwise if it was just a counter, you could flag something multiple times.
What is vouching? Is that a high-reputation-only feature?
Vouching is for saying "this dead comment doesn't suck and deserves to be live "
If you don't have show dead on you won't see those comments.
If you don't have show dead on you won't see those comments.
10 of the 13 posts I have vouched for are no longer dead. I wonder if I singlehandedly resurrected those or many people vouched?
I think just one [vouch] is sufficient to resurrect a comment, but subsequent [flag]s can send it back to a [flagged] (or [dead]) state.
It must be used with care. Excessive vouching for undeserving comments results in a loss of the privilege.
There's not a lot of underserved comments getting killed. Flamebait often stays alive. It often applies to new accounts posting something that looks spammy.
I've done two vouches, one for a new account that formatted their posts neatly, another for a throwaway account that talked about wanting to improve their sex life in a thread about self improvement.
I've done two vouches, one for a new account that formatted their posts neatly, another for a throwaway account that talked about wanting to improve their sex life in a thread about self improvement.
Two vouches, in my case.
when something is flag-killed (or otherwise [dead], e.g. due to the poster being banned), a link appears to "vouch" for it, which counteracts the flags.
I've caught myself accidentally flagging something when I intended to favorite it. This proves that I actually do that quite often.
I stay logged-out on mobile because, while I appreciate the compact format, it's too easy to accidentally vote/flag a post.
Thanks, it looks like I accidentally flagged a bunch of articles in 2020, plus one legit case. Weird!
how can i see my comments and posts that have been flagged ? i bet those are the best submissions
Thanks, looks like I've definitely fat fingered flag a fair bit over time.
Woah, I have a huge number of flagged articles that I don’t even remember seeing.
My guess is that I must have flagged these while scrolling (on my phone). When scrolling, my thumb lands right on “flag | hide”.
@dang, maybe the flag links should only be on the discussion page and not on the list view.
My guess is that I must have flagged these while scrolling (on my phone). When scrolling, my thumb lands right on “flag | hide”.
@dang, maybe the flag links should only be on the discussion page and not on the list view.
+1 for moving flag to discussion pages. I had pages of posts flagged I never knew I flagged.
Is there a way to see the (other users) comments I upvoted?
Click your username in the top right > upvoted comments. There's also a link to your upvoted submissions in the same place.
Note: id is case sensitive.
Does HN support emojis
[deleted]
Nope!
It does in your profile.
Doesn’t here on Google Chrome on the latest version of macOS... It just strips them and leaves white space.
Tragically, the feature has apparently been patched.
You've got to be careful around here, the fun police are always watching...
Haha, I looked through the list and there's some comments I vouched for ages ago that got flagged into oblivion nonetheless. One which said that it was pretty much the old and fat who should stay home and another which said that the AZ vaccine was safe and delaying it when vax supplies were not abundant was tantamount to killing people.
HN's reaction was to upvote highly people who claimed AZ vax was shitty. This is a fun test of seeing if I was right about the evidence. I can now match against truth and see if these guys were right. If they were wrong, then I'm backing misinformation. If they were right, I'm a hero for science.
Good for them taking bold stances.
Do not go gently into the night, my brave friends! Rage against the extinguishing of your light! :D
HN's reaction was to upvote highly people who claimed AZ vax was shitty. This is a fun test of seeing if I was right about the evidence. I can now match against truth and see if these guys were right. If they were wrong, then I'm backing misinformation. If they were right, I'm a hero for science.
Good for them taking bold stances.
Do not go gently into the night, my brave friends! Rage against the extinguishing of your light! :D
Is there one for hidden posts? I have accidentally clicked “Hide” on mobile SO MANY times.
Yep, it's https://news.ycombinator.com/hidden and it shows in your profile.
https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=your_username
https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged?id=your_username
It might be useful to catch flagging-by-fat-fingers. Also to take a look at how well items you vouch for do afterwards.
I figured the vouched link, then dang told me about the flagged one. Couldn't find any references to these on HN or "hidden features" guides, but it's been a while since I last looked.
Do you know of any other hidden links like these?