3 Ways I Would Improve Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

3 Ways I Would Improve Hacker News

blog.jasonshah.org

23 pointsjason_shah40 comments

The number one thing I would improve is add some kind of alert system when someone replies to one of your comments or posts. Email me. Or put some kind of alert icon somewhere on the orange bar that someone has replied to something I'm involved with.

http://notifo.com/hackernews

Notifo is shutting down: http://blog.notifo.com/notifo

That's a great idea. Honestly this was my first post that had as many comments as it did, and I wish I had come back sooner to engage with everything going on.

Your suggestion would have done it. I'll check out the Notifo solution for this now. Thanks!

Here's what I would improve on HN: comments formatting.

Writing and reading long comment is absolutely painful and a sprinkle of markdown/GFM (beyond the current trivial em and code block supports) would make it significantly better.

Also comment preview/review, since the site is very often bloody slow when trying to edit a comment, and the writing area is 1. too small to review long text and 2. not a good way to see if the comment's rendered layout is correct.

edit: and the current state is probably worse than nothing at all, as inline asterisks are rendered as <em> when they're multiplication signs or links to footnote, so you've got shitty formatting and broken comments.

I'd love it if there was a way to view or highlight new comments in a thread. Quite often, I'll read an interesting thread that's got 120 comments, come back a few hours later and see the same thread with 180 comments--but I have no way of knowing which are new without trawling through the whole thing again.

If you are using Chrome then try this (made it a while ago): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fpndmkcfggkffpablc...

I'm finding it useful already, thank you.

This is my biggest complaint with web discussions in general, and still seems to be mostly unsolved 15 years after I remember having this same discussion in the early years of Slashdot. Big usability decline over Usenet or mailing lists, where you could just mark stuff as read and not have this reload-and-scan cycle.

I wrote a Greasemonkey script for this purpose:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/124778

Now I just need to figure out how to sync it between machines ;)

Sorry but I don't really care for all of these changes. They are just small UI additions which can be totally subjective. Plus, let's not forget, you could easily implement all the things you mentioned through browser add-ons, personalizing your own experience.

I'm a little more worried about the comment-karma being removed, which makes it harder for me to reach the best comments.

Thanks for the input. Agreed that these are small UI changes and building browser add-ons could do the trick. The removal of comment-karma is probably a bigger deal; this was my personal take on things I haven't necessarily heard talked about as much.

In my view, it's the small UI things HN and other sites get right that often make the difference though, and a bunch of browser add-ons just seems like a fragmented approach to changes that may benefit a lot of people on HN who may never discover or use the add-ons.

Here is a bunch of cosmetic changes:

1) Include the second level domain on link preview next to title (e.g. plus.google.com)

2) Include some sort of graphics that link a comment response to original comment. It's very difficult to follow a conversation with a lot of comments. The Slashdot vertical lines are an elegant example.

3) Use CSS media queries. I find HN very difficult to navigate using embedded devices. The font, the vote arrow and the margins aree too small.

To #1 I would add: build in comment collapsing.

I've read many threads where the first top-level comment is fantastic. Then there's one or more screen-lengths of comments piggybacking off that comment.

My favorite feature of Reddit is being to sort comments by vote total, then collapse a thread after reading the first comment. Auto-collapsed low point threads would also be a good disincentive for inane posting.

On the first idea:

I have an idea on how to indicate the value of a discussion. After comments, list a "buzz: " value that is the sum of all upvotes in the comments.

This works as an indication of how people feel about the contents of the comments. The higher the buzz, the greater interest in the conversion.

I'd like to be able to collapse a thread. Often the top comment is insightful, but not directly relevant.

Is there a way to see all comments I have upvoted? This is one thing I would really like.

Nice suggestions. I'd like to point out that there are already many great apps that improve hacker news: http://www.hnsearch.com/apps (many more on this thread).

Useful link. Very comprehensive. I wish there was a better way to connect people who need these apps with this link and the pages for the apps since personally I knew of HN Search but never navigated to the Cool Apps page. I guess people just need to be aware of it. Maybe HN could promote it on the site at some point.

Those are some pretty solid ideas. I also agree that improvements can be made to the comment system, possibly something for me to play around with in my spare time.

Thanks! I think comment systems generally (not just HN's) can use a lot of improvement. Better and better sorting algorithms based on recency, user quality, responses to the comment, etc. seem incremental, honestly. It's helpful, but if I were to redesign commenting systems from scratch I would think about the current linear format, whether comments that relate to each other could intelligently be grouped together, etc. I feel like if companies like Disqus and Livefyre are going to compete with the added social value Facebook brings, they're going to have to figure this out and really revolutionize conversations on sites.

For #1 for now you can check out: http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

#1 thing I would want is speeding up the site. I've experienced a lot of slowness and empty pages when trying to submit comments.

concerning comments: I would again recommend to order comments not just by their respective score, but to a degree by the score of the comments in reply. otherwise a controversial comment might get buried below the fold.

To the author, would you consider making the fonts on your site maybe 2-3x bigger? 12px is really hard to read against a solid white background. Plus visually, I think it makes your site look better at a bigger size.

2-3x bigger seems fairly huge... You can increase the font size (in Chrome and Firefox at least) via ctrl+mousewheel up which should fix it for you, at least temporarily.

(I'm not the author, btw.)

Yup, I know. First thing I did. I didn't mean 2-3x pixel size, rather percentage.

Which solid white background are you referring to?

That would be the solid white background of his entire site when viewed on a computer or other computational device of certain modern antiquity.

Thanks for the suggestion, Charles! Enlarged the font to 14px earlier today.

Or, at least, make it browse-able on iPhone and other smartphones.

Fix the moderation system so it's not trivial. Trivial moderation is worthless.

my only suggestion which is super easy to implement is to open links in new windows. :D

Strongly disagree with this. It's fairly trivial to configure this behaviour in your browser (a plugin in the worst case), and really not much of a burden to hold shift when you click your link anyway. The cost for everyone else is that there's no easy way to get "new window" links to open in the same page, which is particularly frustrating on mobile devices.

For chrome: https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

no thanks. That's breaking the usability.

How does that break usability? Reddit does it. Also HN is an aggregator, so it makes sense to keep it open in a tab and open the links in new tabs.

It's actually a preference on reddit, and one that (IIRC) is off by default.

In terms of breaking usability, people expect links to open in the current window/tab. Having them open a new window/tab is disorientating at best.

Because others do it doesn't mean that everyone should do it. If you want to open it in a new window or a new tab, just click with the correct key on your keyboard pressed. That's what people expect and that's the correct way to do it.

scrollwheel-click solves the problem

Reply on news.ycombinator.com