It should only be used for spams and really egregious trolling, not for stuff that's merely vapid or mistaken or off-topic.

Please don't click on it just to try it out. Flags are really being recorded, so flagging something randomly could damage the reputation of the flagger and/or the submitter of the thing that got flagged.

That would cut down on flagging for the sake of flagging.

It's not a bad idea but it has the same problem as trying to describe why you like something instead of agreeing. I know there's a talk by Barry Schwartz on decision theory ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=paradox+of+choice that argues against explaining instead of just choosing. A flag is enough. People around here are pretty smart. The reasons why will mostly be obvious.

The only thing I don't like is it ius close to the "delete","parent" tag. My clumsy mouse-hands might hit it by mistake.

And if some really use it inappropriately then they could just lose their right to flag. No need to bother the vast majority who will use it when it's deserved.

The added benefit is that you have much less accidental flagging.

Simplicity.

just like any tiny barrier to signing up for your website is important.

I'm sure a lot of people are going to be clicking on it just because it is there. I know I would've if I hadn't ran into this thread first :)

(edit) Would it make sense to display current flag count ? Perhaps if it's over certain threshold. It is after all an interesting metric.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226414

Maybe incidence of this will go down in the future, but the link I'm least likely to click is right next to the one I'm most likely to click, so the mistake is easy.

Although if the intent is to discourage that usage pattern and make people more careful about voting in the first place, then it works, at least in my case. I use votes as bookmarks much more extensively on digg, where I know I can undo them.

Would you write better code if your text editor didn't have undo and you didn't use version control? Probably not.

More importantly, although I've reduced my usage of votes as bookmarking, I don't see why that's a good thing. The implied counter example is that if people could unvote, it would be a giant safety net and unleash a tidal wave of spurious votes, with people clicking on stories willy nilly because their actions were reversable. This doesn't sound true - more realistic scenarios are that there'd be a slight bump in votes overall or even a reduction of "bad" votes by allowing people to correct misclicks.

Thinking about my usage patterns, I bet a lot of people realize they can't take back their votes, use votes as bookmarks anyway and are simply annoyed at not being able to trim down their "saved" list by removing outdated/mistaken/irrelevant links. The lack of an undo feature doesn't change most people's actions unless they notice in advance that it's missing because the action they're about to perform is something really important, like paying for something or deleting their writing.

A big chunk of the problem may simply be the verbiage and language of the profile page. I can see how newish people (like myself) misunderstand voting for saving because votes are displayed as "Saved: ##" rather than "Votes: ##" instead. Saving implies bookmarking, as well as unsaving. Being able to "unvote" sounds unnatural, it sounds like what happened to Gore in Florida and nobody would expect to take back their participation in a poll. Whereas "unsaving" doesn't sound weird and is a routine operation.

I have 143 karma but I don't see that yet (although I do see 'flag'). Hmm.

Seriously, you get to change the colour of the orange bar at the top when you're at or above 250 karma. Either then or if you can be bothered to set up some user CSS or javascript. :) No idea if there are further perks beyond that.

Okay, not really. In fact, I'm not sure there are any perks beyond that, either. :)

I know at 5 you can downvote comments, and at 250 you can change your bar color. Somewhere in there, you can create polls, but I don't know how that works, so I don't know what level karma is needed.

I'm at 408, and I can't see a way to start polls, so I'm guessing that's at 500.

Thanks for pointing that out. I now have a blue top bar!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226682

Does it really make sense to "flag" comments?

EDIT: Ugh, it's already annoying me on the new/front pages, as the "<n> comments"/"discuss" links are harder to see and click now.

pg, would you mind swapping the "flag" and "discuss" links on story listing pages? Thanks!

EDIT2: same for the "parent" link on thread pages, I've had a couple near misses in the last 2 minutes.

When I hit the homepage I got this sudden feeling of wrongness in my stomach, like vertigo. Only then did I consciously see the new "flag" links.

So, yeah, I also vote to move the flag links to the left.

(This reminds me of Teresa Nielsen Hayden's stories about the superhumanly-talented copy editors who perceive typos as literally jumping out of the page, or blinking, or who feel physical pain at the sight of misspelled words.)

1. Blatant machine-generated spam?

2. Really nasty stuff? (child porn, incitement to violence)

3. Slightly nasty stuff? (ordinary porn, Rick Astley)

4. Slightly spammy stuff? (unjustifiable advertising-like links?)

5. Comments which are insulting or nasty?

6. Comments which are just plain stupid?

7. Comments which only slightly stupid?

8. Things which you think are "not appropriate for HN"?

9. Other categories of stuff you don't want to see?

update: Never mind, answered by pg elsewhere.

Moving 'flag' leftward on the line would help a bit. Making it only appear on the clikthrough page for an individual story or comment would help a lot -- requiring an extra click to flag something but not imposing clutter on all good contributions.

At some point anti-crime measures themselves become a community bummer. 'Flag' links everywhere are a little like walking through a neighborhood where all the windows/doorways are protected by metal bars.

What percentage of our attention is soaked up by defense? Over a certain threshold and the spamorrists have "won".

edit1: I did this before pg explained what 'flag' is for. Now I feel bad.

edit2: oops... I am used to clicking on the last link 'parent'. Did it once by mistake on a comment.

  (def flaglink (i user whence)
    (when (and user (> (karma user) flag-threshold*))
      (pr bar*)
      (w/rlink (do (if (mem user i!flags)
                       (pull user i!flags)
                       (push user i!flags))
                   (save-item i)
                   whence)
        (pr (if (mem user i!flags) "unflag" "flag")))))

This uncovered a bug: a deleted + flagged post produces a strange looking thing in Safari: the words "deleted" and "flagged" superimposed on each other.

Wow, actually I like this idea.