First it starts with categories and tags (and maintaining a taxonomy?), then you need search, then start adding other stuff, ultimately you've remade something like Digg.
HN is simple and clean.
This is also why the search bar is only at the bottom of the pages. And... Alogolia search is quite robust, so you should be able to find what you need with longtail search and the date/popularity filter.
I'm rebuilding my website over at https://dev.hazumi.news which will soon let you search and filter by categories assigned by AI, e.g. posts by tech news, programming, business, economics, etc.
The iOS version today already has keyword based push notifications (with pro subscription), so you can toggle on notifications for specific keywords like Ruby, Rust, Apple, Google, etc from a predefined list, that I can add to if you request it.
Here's the app if you're interested: https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/hazumi-news/id1670237209
Off the top of my head:
- visual clutter
- dev time and resources, maintenance
- moderation cost
Adding this feature now wouldn’t make much of a difference to your perceived issue because it would be impossible to tag historical submissions.
Lobste.rs does tags and there is decent overlap with HN submissions, so you might want to look into using that.
> The current search function is not quite sufficient when I need to find a specific type of topic.
You have an example of this? Algolia supports searching through comments also.