Ask HN: I am building an alternative to HN | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I am building an alternative to HN

5 pointsyuashizuki19 comments

what features would u like to have?

I would actually like a site that's identical to HN, except that comments lacking proper capitalization are auto-killed.

I expect you're being facetious here, but that's something a coder could make a browser add-on for, if only for the fun of it.

Any takers?

I don't want to ignore their posts, or have them invisible from me. I want the people that fail to use proper capitalization to have their posts automatically rejected and, to be mildly facetious about it, repeat offenders should be hellbanned or publicly shamed. It's disrespectful to your readers to make such a show of putting zero effort into your posts, as if you're too precious to use the same shift keys that everybody else bothered to use.

Edit: Okay, I am being slightly facetious in expressing how strongly I care about this.

Substitute popularity (karma bubbling) for relevance (tags+search). I open HN home page 2-3 times per day (seldom I need to click on more). Of all the results, 3-4 are relevant to me but I still need to quickly read all the titles to find them. Build something smart that lists only what is relevant to me and you have a killer app.

For example what is it that you find relevant today on HN. I usualy find all links to be pretty intresting.

Something like quora where you get to follow topics of your choice.

We built one - or more like, we're building one. Not a HN clone, but a tool to let you create a HN clone.

http://postatic.com

It's a work in progress, but there are handful of cool sites that have been created so far.

Examples

http://tools.robingood.com http://self.postatic.com http://www.slackchats.com

Looks nice and clean...good work. Reminds me of Telescope (built with Meteor): http://www.telesc.pe/

Make submissions tag-able so i can customize my front page (perhaps only allow predefined tags). There are a number of topic-categories i do not care about and they withhold interesting links.

notifications for replies and comments that you can adjust as needed.

I would like a more powerful search.

the popularity of HN

i cant make it popular, its on others if they like it, and thats not a feature

It most certainly is a feature.

Popularity is an outcome. It may arise due to a combination of features (e.g. adding viral 'share this' buttons, or having karma to encourage participation from existing users) but it's not a feature in the sense of 'a piece of functionality you can build'.

It's an important outcome, and the OP will need to figure out what features will encourage/support popularity.

Hacker News's list of features is, let's be honest, spartan. Yet it still manages to pull in considerable viewership precisely because it's popular. Circular reasoning, I know. That's the way it works.

Popularity isn't just a feature - it's the single most important feature in any community-driven website.

Please do. I am tired of HN BS but keep coming back because it has great links. But some of the commenters are just assholes :)

Welcome to the internet?

HN, in my experience, is one of the better communities online. Trolls seem to be few and far between, and when they do show up, they're downvoted into oblivion. If you think HN is full of assholes, you're going to be sorely disappointed by most other sites too...

Yes I would agree. I've almost always found HN comments to be helpful and useful. At the worst they are neutral/add no value but are definitely not nasty trolls.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com