Ask HN: What do you think of these ideas to improve HN | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you think of these ideas to improve HN

6 pointsCharuru4 comments

There are a few things about HN that i think could be improved:

Non insightful, bland comments with just enough information in them to make them upvote worthy. especially tl;drs, links to previous threads on the same link, and so on. These annoy me, as someone who likes to actually read the links, and find many of the highest ranked tl;drs somewhat bad.

I propose: a stackoverflow style community wiki on every thread. http://i54.tinypic.com/35n1nag.png

This way we don't have to read the obvious, or read the a summary about the article we just read. But meanwhile people who enjoy tldrs can still get them.

Jokes: 99% of the time I feel the tech jokes are really obvious+lame. Like the one comparing the NASA leak to wikileaks.

I propose: a 'joke' flag. When viewing a comment, the comment author or others can flag a comment as a joke. That comment thread will then disappear from view of those who deactivates jokes in their account settings.

Any thoughts?

I'm fairly new around here (lurked for a couple months, finally made an account last week) but one of the things that I really like about HN is the no frills approach. It would be extremely easy for a community of hackers to get carried away with adding features to a site (as the plethora of HN-based "Hello Worlds" demonstrate) but I enjoy that the site itself has remained "raw". I don't think either of your ideas are bad, but I personally would vote for the "if it ain't broke..." approach in this case.

EDIT:typos

I don't really see tl;dr comments very often, but when there are links to other submissions of the same item I don't mind so much as there is other discussion to browse through.

Comments already can be flagged so I don't know why a joke flag would be needed, and jokes are pretty rarely voted up unless the articles is more of a joke article.

I think comments are easy enough to skim that most of these complaints really don't matter, besides community wiki type thing wouldn't be of much use as hacker news comment threads tend to die off quite quickly.

See the "Feature Requests" link at the bottom of the page, which links to this topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

There are plenty of good ideas, I have a feeling if pg actively sought out new suggestions there would be hundreds of posts. No matter what is implemented though your taking the site away from what it is, simple, effective core functionality with just what you need and nothing else.

Stackoverflow is kind of the exact opposite, adding every feature imaginable. I think both extremes are effective, it's just harder within the middle ground.

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