One reason we don't do a lot of visible changes is that HN's minimalism is one of its biggest assets. Another is that users don't like things to change, and the internal pressures that cause companies to do arbitrary redesigns are thankfully not in play here.
I wasn't trying to diminish the work being done, but I couldn't find a more recent official update announcement than the one I linked from 2016.
They can, but don't have to. There's no business need being served here like there would be with a startup getting feedback from customers, and HN isn't open sourced, so there's no direct way to do pull requests or report issues.
They could literally just publish changes and ignore people's opinions on the matter, that would be perfectly valid given their small staff and available commitment.
Also, if they wanted to keep feature requests and complaints off of HN proper, having a changelog or request thread might be an effective way to quarantine that content.
I assume there's been lots of work to make the site more efficient/reduce cost. "No [few] internal pressures" sounds like a great recipe for an interesting design.
And an API, practically by definition, is not a benefit to membership or a draw for whatever HN considers a typical user, much less the sort of "normie" non-technical user HN wants to keep away. The quality of comments is not maintained to a high standard by the API being more difficult to query than it could be, nor would it be diluted by the API being easier to use.
And as far as Reddit goes, a lot of content gets posted here from Reddit, and a lot of the userbase here are also Reddit users, making the cultural contempt HN has for Reddit more than a bit hypocritical.
A lot of people here, pg included, seem to assume that the "low tech" nature of the featureset here is keeping some flood of unwanted users away but I submit that the title of the site being "Hacker News", it being on a subdomain and the lack of evangelism on mainstream social media do a far better job of gatekeeping than purposely adding "friction" to frustrate people.
HN is for the intellectually curious. Many of the posts here are technical but there have always been plenty of non-technical discussions as well.
A lot of people here seem to believe the site is supposed to be for technical users and technical content onlym even though that never was the case. The negative impressions people seem to have about "turning into Reddit" or non-technical content diminishing the sites' quality feed into that stereotype, as does the belief that adding "features that reduce friction" would somehow dilute content.
But... the guidelines do use the qualifier "anything that good hackers would find interesting" for determining what's on topic, which does lead people to fill in the blanks for what a "good hacker" should find interesting.
But which features are missing?
The markdown support is extremely minimal and doesn't support a lot of basics like quotes (which causes many people to "quote" by using a code block, which has issues).
A basic private messaging system would be really helpful in a lot of cases. Right now people always have to post email addresses publicly.
It would be nice to have some built-in visibility into things like title changes, link changes, etc. that mods do, instead of needing them to comment manually about everything they do.
They could implement some scraping to automatically add the year to older stories, instead of users needing to flag it and get the mods to do it manually all the time.
And so on.
> The markdown support is extremely minimal and doesn't support a lot of basics like quotes (which causes many people to "quote" by using a code block, which has issues).
Obvious enough.
An extra button: moderated, is with a comment.
Scraping is different for each website.