Ask HN: Feedback about HN itself. What do you think? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Feedback about HN itself. What do you think?

5 pointsJoelMarsh9 comments

I like the content of this site, but I also have a few suggestions, based on a few months as a regular visitor:

1) Make internal links smarter. If I read a page for 10 minutes and then click "next" I often get an error. Not an error page. Just the error text. I actually got this error when trying to submit this post.

2) Please implement a "collapse" button on all 1st-level comments. In big conversations I want to skip to the next comment when I am not interested. I don't want to scroll slowly down the page to find it.

3) Please add a "Show" tab to the main navigation, similar to "Ask". If anybody needs a little extra exposure, it's the people who are releasing new stuff.

4) Make the voting buttons bigger, and allow "undo". I think you'll agree that "tiny disappearing buttons" doesn't have that "awesome UX" ring to it. Especially when they are the primary user action that fuels the function of the site.

5) I see that "saved stories" is a possibility in my profile, but I have yet to find the button/link that allows me to save stories. Does it exist?

6) You're gonna hate this one, but I really wish there was a way to see when someone has replied to my comments. i.e. — Notifications. I would gladly sacrifice the "threads" and "comments" pages for a tab that has something similar but only relevant to me.

7) Does karma have any effect on anything, or is it just gamification? I can't see the scores of comments or people in context, therefore they are useless to me. My own karma points have more use as a notification (if it goes up, something happened) than anything else. If karma creates influence... a little info somewhere would be awesome (in my "dashboard" maybe?).

Thank you.

People generally get shat on when they give suggestions for improving the site. At this point everyone has accepted that it is what it is and made up reasons why it's a good thing. "It filters out the people we wouldn't want here", which is weird because we all love good design and will argue about proper implementations.

Anyhow, I haven't been around for long but it seems like there is one guy running the show that has no interest in updating this website. It's a silly side project for him. Personally, I think it's time he lets his baby fly and get a couple trusted contributors and make some changes. (Which is hard for me to say because I just wrote scrapers for the site...)

"It filters out the people we wouldn't want here", I got downvoted for calling this reason dumb. Maybe not the best thing to say but I really think that is a bad excuse.

Agreed. Really bad excuse, and since there's been like 5 posts like yours in the last month (not to mention a couple dozen apps, CSS alterations, and alternate sites for viewing it) the people who aren't content aren't just leaving. We're here because we love the articles, content and people but the website itself is kind of a disaster.

1) This is due to the page structure and how it's cached. Many people complain about it.

2) That might be nice. Does anyone have this as a browser extension? I know there's a few to make HN a bit more readable (I don't use any)

3) "Ask" I believe is simply submitting a story without a link. By convention we prefix with "Show HN" or "Ask HN"

4) Indeed, tiny voting buttons. See greasemonkey/browser extensions/whatever to customize site.

5) Upvoting a story puts it in "Saved Stories"

6) I think there's a 3rd party site for comment replies.

7) At ~500 karma, you get downvote privileges. I think Karma also affects your placement on the page. We used to be able to see karma points next to names for posts other than your own, but PG turned that off and I believe overall it's improved discussions (there's some data for this).

See the "Feature Request" link at the bottom: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982388

If an upvote is a save, that's a good idea (it's a good feedback loop) but that definitely should be communicated somewhere when you register. If nobody knows that it sort of kills the thought behind it.

Cool - I added Joel's collapse feature request to that page because I, too, have wanted that feature. I just copy/pasted and left a link back here. Hopefully folks will upvote it.

http://hnnotify.com/ for notifications re replies, via email. been testing it a few weeks; works great.

Notifications via email. That would just annoy me. It's the first thing I switch off (if I can) on sites that do it.

1. Structural issue, something to do with HN running off flat files on one machine.

2. shrug

3. No comment.

4. PG has said that he wants to add undo, but doesn't think it's a big enough deal to patch it.

5. All upvoted stories are saved automatically.

6. That would be nice.

7. Supposedly it skews the ranking algorithm in your favor. At 500 you get the downvote.

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