* Similarly, do something to curtail or discourage posts from getting hijacked by a mediocre early top level comment.
* Design comment ranking features with cognizance that users are trying to get visibility for their comments, and this incentive sometimes distorts the conversation. For example, I might wonder, what gives the most visibility for my comment, top posting, or posting right under this highly inflammatory comment that is getting a lot of attention, or posting under a mediocre comment that was early and was therefore voted to the top despite its low quality? I may choose according to my desire for visibility, instead of choosing according to where the comment fits best. Do something to counter this. I don't know exactly what, though… it would need more thought and possibly months of experimentation to find the right recipe for success here. But at least, as a basic starting point, recognize that this is a real dynamic, and then from that starting point, try to design comment ranking behaviors to address it.
* Lightly penalize comments that start with forms of "TBH" or "genuine question."
* Leave it text based, as is. The visual design is fine. Great, even.
* Auto save drafts so a stray touch on a touch bar or a mobile back button doesn't nuke what you've written so far.
That is a less noisy way to say ‘thanks’ that I think would get used more, and would inform users that they aren’t replying to a vacuum.
They're generally looking for things that cause slightly lower entropy in the comment speed, I think, but this is an interesting exception.
I find it annoying when someone asks a question with no description and never comes back to clarify. Just an ambiguous question in a headline. Like (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27801976). No idea on the best solution…
I find the discovery of past content a bit rough. Specifically search is either always doing the most recent or the highest voted submissions: never a combination of the both (aka something like hotness). So if I search on “Python”, I can choose recent uninteresting low votes stuff or 10 year old highest voted stuff that’s out of date. What I really want is “most recent, interesting Python stuff”.
But please don’t touch much else, it’s probably the most useful website and community I’ve used anywhere!
Don't display comments on the newcomments page beyond a certain comment depth (which inevitably stray from the context of the original article) or which have been downvoted. In other words, curate it a bit so it doesn't provide as much low-hanging fruit for snipers.
I really wish the API would get an update. It would be nice to be able to do queries by range or to get entire threads at a time.
If HN thinks it's necessary to use the "anti clickbait filter", they should at least do it like with too long titles: refuse the submission.
Rewrite the title and let the user click "submit" again.
It’s also like almost the only website I use that works fine on a crappy LTE connection.
Looking back through my threads, I'm surprised to learn that you can't reply after 15 days.
Especially on threads with many comments (500+) with users being inside different timezones/activity rhythms or being subjected to time constraints as a reader.
- Add a convenient way to do bulleted lists
- Clean up the horrendous HTML