Should I have been able to mark my own flag as helpful?

Question

A low-quality post appeared in the flag queue and I clicked the "flag" button to reinforce it. Only after doing that did I realize that I could just cast a delete vote instead. Mine was the third vote, so that deleted the post. I felt bad about the now-obsolete flag that I couldn't withdraw, and out of curiosity looked at my flag history to see if the system had been smart enough to auto-resolve it.

It did. That's good. It also marked it as helpful.

Should that have happened? It's probably not a big deal (how often does the situation come up, and do we really care about a few "bonus" helpful flags on the way to Deputy and Marshal?), but it seemed odd to have, essentially, resolved my own flag.

I don't think a flag in this case should be declined (there was a problem, after all, and we don't want to mis-train the Community flagger), but perhaps, as with comments that are deleted by their owners before the flag is handled, there should be an intermediate "obsolete" state?

Answer 1

This isn't actually a bad thing. If something is really bad and should be removed faster than the community can handle it, casting a delete vote followed by a flag can help resolve it faster, especially if it's a very low quality or not an answer flag because other 2k users can see it and do something about it.

Your flag was likely marked as helpful because the post was deleted, either by a mod or by other users casting delete votes, so it sounds like your flag was useful!