I'm disappointed that HN has become such a big news site, because it is not designed responsibly to be one, so trying to get a post featured is very difficult. I think the only reason any posts do get featured is because of the 'sockpuppets' that the submitters have built up (or that follow the content), but that is legitimate upvoting (I'm not sure why someone would upvote something they aren't interested in?).

Perhaps the most important change that HN needs to make is to have topics. It isn't fair to other people and content if the stream is full of NodeJS content, but that is a legitimate interest so HN can't ban the prominent workers in that field (bizarre). The ban from HN seems to be purely a side effect of the fact that the maintainers are not interested in designing the system responsibly (they are too busy with other responsibilities). Topic channels are obviously needed.

I think the difference between HN and reddit needs to be considered well and the two should be integrated some how, I would like to see topic channels on HN.