I use it because on the HN mobile site, it’s fairly easy to fat finger it. I’ve never used it legitimately. So chalk up at least one person who clicks it by accident.

I will note that is almost always why I downvote anything as well - the mobile UX encourages accidental clicks like that.

Make that two. I’ve never hit it deliberately, but constantly fat finger it.

I’ve a greasemonkey user script to hide it on desktop, but on mobile safari I’m all out of luck.

You might want to take a look at this Safari Extension for userscripts on iOS.

https://github.com/quoid/userscripts

Then please remove it.

I have hit the hide button twice, and by mistake.

When I tried to use this for cleaning up my feed, same links appeared towards the end as different entried. Happened thrice or so. I don't use it since then.

IMO, you also need to get rid of the flag button on the homepage. I have also fat-fingered it ~3 times. One of them, I was able to unflag it from my browser history.

Flag should only be availavle on the story page, IMO, and not the home page.

The hide button is useful for me.

I read the HN front page several times a day, and hide posts that are obvious ragebait, low quality submissions, or things that negatively affect my mood due to personal reasons.

By hiding posts I can make sure that the next page load is a bit better than the default one.

I use it (deliberately) all the time.

I think it needs to be improved. I sometimes hit it when I don't mean to on mobile. Otherwise I use it all the time to hide topics that don't interest me.

I use the hide button infrequently but I do use it. Maybe making it an opt-in profile setting is a reasonable solution, since most of the responses are negative it seems?

Both the hide and flag buttons have non-trivial consequences, for which thread titles do not provide sufficient context. If they could be limited to the story page, their usage would gain context from comments, and suffer less accidental clicks on mobile.

It's also distracting to have 60 link targets occupying tactile and optical real estate on the front page, when they are rarely pressed. Limiting hide/flag to the story page would reduce front page link targets by one-third.

Or maybe just give the opportunity to _undo_ it by re-clicking it shortly after if misclicked instead of hiding it in the void.

There should be a list of links you've hidden in your profile, you can undo it from there.

The compromise might be a confirm dialog. Since this button is right next to comments, people often hit it on mobile. Flag could maybe use one as well

If it could be moved, or require confirmation (or an undo option), that would be awesome. I keep accidentally hitting it, and it makes me sad.

Instead of removing it, you should encourage more people to use it, since it seems feature-blindness is a bit of a problem wrt the design here. Removing it just means the people who were using it will just resort to abusing flagging and complaining about content not being "HN worthy."

Granted, people do that all the time, anyway, but the hide button is at least an outlet for some.

I suppose we could remove it temporarily to see what happens...

Please keep it. It's useful for many people as I can tell from this thread.

While I have your attention (hopefully), there's a bug where if I use the hide link on any page other than the first page, the stories that pop up at the bottom to replace the one I just hid are from the first page stories, not from the page I'm on. I think it's a pagination bug.