Ask HN: Ideas for improving HN s/n ratio

1 point·karmakaze··5 comments

For those who think HN is fine as it is, this post is not for you. For others I'm sure this topic has been discussed many times before. I'd been giving some thought as to what might work for my defn of 'improve'.

I was hoping to get a list ideas here that you think would work and references to other lists/discussions.

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Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636213

That's from 2012. What I'm specifically asking about is returning the s/n ratio to 2012 days.

A way to filter submissions and comments to only those submitted by accounts that have either applied to YC or one of its programs.

That's a very specialized filter. Seems more like a sort of 'Ask YC' type thing for topics of concern to the group.

I thought of something similar but less restrictive like an 'opt-in' version of that for those who would like less volume of posts and more of the 'in-depth' variety (identified by upvotes by same).

Filtering comments is tricky since dropping messages in the middle of the thread loses context. Counting comments/votes-on-comments (by opted-in) might work for surfacing posts or reording displayed comments.

One problem for me is going through the sheer volume of posts and finding those gems that are don't sit at the top.

I made https://hackerer.news to show all the top posts, Ask/Show, and recent on a single page split by date. That saves time so I don't rescan headlines I saw yesterday and I can quickly see less mainstream posts in the middle.

Are there other HN viewers that try to improve S/N? (I had been using hckrnews.com previously.)

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