Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Anybody want to suggest other possibilities?

Downvote posts? Not that I would really personally use that, but it seems the logical next step with the other "powers" unlocked at karma milestones.

My concern with any change made is that it would encourage people to try and get a bunch of karma which could have unforeseen effects on the quality of discussion/submissions. I'm sure you'll be taking that into account for any change made, though.

Not allowing post downvotes is, IMO, a key factor in what allows HN to be such a great community. Subreddits that allow downvoting, for instance, often see topics that would expand their contributors' horizons "die in New" not because they are against the rules, per say, but because the user who happens to see them first thinks "this isn't my cup of tea." Flagging is the right answer - let people flag flagrant rule violations, but don't let them kill things they find uninteresting. That allows interesting content to rise for everyone.

There is already a hide function that will hide posts and its comments. People need to use it more instead of flagging stories they just don't want to see, or complaining about how those stories aren't "Hacker News material"

Downvoting posts could be used to build algorithmic feeds, so users could see content corresponding to the ratio of items they voted up or down. But that might be too much of a "social media" feature and I could see Hacker News getting out the torches and pitchforks for something like that.

In other communities, clicking a "downvote" button should open the modal for reporting rule violations, allowing the user to select the correct type.

> Downvote posts?

I think both in practice and in theory the function downvotes serve for comments are served by flags on posts.

Hide all karma scoring from the entire site once a user reaches 1000 karma.

“Enlightenment mode”

This would be a nice feature.

Actually the ability to change the background as already suggested, just like the top, would be great.

Dark mode.

I know, I know, that's an old one as well. But hey, it would be really really nice.

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