Tell HN: You can see your vouched and flagged items
It is possible to see items you vouched for or flagged by editing and visiting these links:
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?
109 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadIf you don't have show dead on you won't see those comments.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Sometimes, devil you know....
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.
Here’s a good starting point from Mozilla covering accessibility: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...
It's one of the only sites which does this today.
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%23%23%20ycombinator.com&type=...
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
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.
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.
(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
at the top of every single page.I just got mad and got JAWS working in demo/evaluation mode. Here's what blind users hear every time they visit HN:
That doesn't sound too bad, but as outlined (somewhat) in the video above, blind users typically don't go for walls of text like the above, they typically navigate interactively by virtually zooming "in" and "out" of the navigation hierarchy in a document.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 rega...
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.
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.
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.
Lets hire the Reddit or (iirc) SlashDot designers for the re-design ;-)
If more people report the same thing, it might be worth improving the UI a little.
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.
Check for yourself, you might be surprised.
Maybe I'm mis-remembering, as clearly they can't be if they're stored somewhere on a per-user basis...
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
I also remember to have intentionally flagged a few posts, but I don’t recognize them.
I don’t understand this view fully.
"a newspaper or magazine advertisement giving information about a product in the style of an editorial or objective journalistic article."