I honestly don't know why this isn't already built into HN.
I don't think HN is doing that great a job in surfacing the best content or encouraging better discourse in comments, but making it easy to follow favorite users instead of going to the front page would make it worse, IMHO.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn2go/logdfcelflpg... (shameless plug)
... I definitely wondered about this. All of a sudden, it turns HN into a popularity contest where the elite get all the attention and everyone else is completely ignored.
While the effect isn't overwhelming, making the content of a limited pool of 'thought leaders' more prevalent is certainly the bias that a karma system is intended to create. Of course HN presupposes that high karma correlates to high quality content and a high quality user, which is probably why as I understand it, karma gets used as a weight for things like the effect of flagging or downvoting. But if they didn't want it to be a popularity contest, I would assume they wouldn't make user karma public. You don't give people a metric without expecting it to be gamed.
I've never heard that one, and it's not the purpose. PG added it years ago when the YC alumni community had gotten too big for everyone to know each other.
That's hardly HN's goal, though. HN itself has code and features that encourage some users to vote for content purely based on who submitted the content or what company they work for. HN's certainly not a democratic voting society where votes are treated equally and we're all encouraged to vote purely on the merits of content.
I do like HN a lot, even with that lack of fairness built in to the system. I agree that letting normal users follow each other would make the 'problem' worse (this is what brought Digg down, as a core issue), but it's not like HN sees this as a problem, exactly.
That is not true. What gave you that impression?
I understand that you may not have built those features with that favouritism consequence in mind, but it's there for sure. Also, it seems likely to me that you'd consider this favouritism to (probably) produce higher-quality content hitting the front page more frequently, which I've certainly seen as a stated goal of HN (quality is more important than fairness or user preference, hence titles changing, etc). So maybe it's not a bad thing. I dunno, really.
I'm admittedly a bit sensitive to charges of favouritism on HN because we put so much effort into trying to be even-handed, even though (a) it's impossible to balance these things perfectly, (b) it's hard to measure whether we're getting it right, and (c) some people won't believe what we say anyhow. For what it's worth, the corresponding complaint on the other side (i.e. among YC founders) is that HN is biased against them.
Hmm? What do you mean by this? If you're referring to the (YC) submission tags, that doesn't indicate that particular bias.
Note that submissions from certain people/companies add extra relevant context
> Note that submissions from certain people/companies add extra relevant context
Yes, I think I agree. I'm okay with the way things are, ish. It would be better with more transparency, though, but HN's "goal" seems to be quality, and they certainly think that quality is increased with increased visibility to YC-related submissions. My only problem would be HN posing as "fair", which I don't think they do.
If you are a very well known user like patio, it's possible that you'll get a good amount of upvotes more easily. For most users, however, it seems to me to be a matter of good title, good content and luck as to whether or not your submission does well.
Patio's comments, in my experience, are an outlier in quality/length, so it's hard to use that as a trend.
Anyway, to me it seems that, with the rare exception, HN is pretty good in each submission being judged on its own.