The whole site needs rewriting and modernizing. Considering the audience, it's kind of shocking how stale it is.
But who knows, maybe it will even be better if it gets a little make-over.
Imageboards can have pretty low-tech and annoyingly obtuse UX as well but trolls adapt and abound because there are no user accounts and they know they have an audience. Most of the trolling I think i've seen here has been done through throwaway accounts, so who knows whether or not those are sockpuppets of existing accounts or people showing up from /g/ to have some fun?
Email replies are covered by HN Notify, which, while hacky, does the job. It would be nice to have a simple Reddit-style red envelope, though, rather than clicking my username, then 'Comments' to see if I've had replies.
Of course, there are people who will say, "How much effort is it to click the back button?" but the irony is that these are exactly the kind of bad UX choices that the HN community would criticize any "Show HN" for.
I find the dissuasion away from multiple levels of replies as though in-depth discussion is a bad thing to be bewildering. Comments like "Replying here because I can't reply deeper" shouldn't need to exist. Apparently it's to prevent arguments, but collapsible comments would hide away anything you don't want to follow further.
I agree that a notification of replies would be useful. Small tip, instead of clicking your username then clicking on comments, which is something I did for a long time too, just click on the threads link at the top of the page. Takes you to the same content, but in one click rather than two.
Popularity, I guess. It became a very general interest site that covers a wide range of interests, and therefore appeals to an equally wide range of visitors -- including those with, shall we say, poor taste and etiquette. HN, on the other hand, is largely centered around the working programmer, a group of people who, for the most part, are looking for something interesting rather than memetic jibber jabber.
The autodetection algorithms probably need tweaking as well - from time to time I see users with polite comment histories mysteriously getting shadowbanned. Sometimes another user will look into it and post a comment to that effect, but without a user-to-user messaging system or a method to reply to dead comments, there's no guarantee that a shadowbanned user will see a friendly message.
This abuse of power is ruining the system for those who have new accounts or only post occasionally.
Trolls just use the add-ons. Trolls will put in effort that normal users would not. A lot of online communities design based on the idea that trolls are lazy, and I think that has not served us well.
I'm particularly leery of collapsible threads, although my understanding is we're about to get them anyways.
May I ask why? As someone who considers that the one change/improvement I'd like to see on HN I'm curious what there is to be leery of that I may not have considered.
To me it seems like collapsible threads would help, not harm, in this case because more people would have collapsed the OT first thread and participated in the discussion about the actual topic. I realize there are two assumptions built in to the above that may not always be true: 1) OT threads are bad or less desirable and 2) more people in a discussion is better.
0 http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2012/03/29/a-womans-story.ht... 1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3772292
Right now, for me at least I often just scroll down to the next top-level comment because it's a bother to find the end of a comment tree that started several indentations in.
HN supporting collapsible threads doesn't mean automatically collapsing threads.
Very few posts last more than a few hours here :)
There have been times where I've gone to bed, then checked HN in the morning, and some huge issue or release has happened, there's a quality thread with hundreds of comments, and it's largely inactive because everyone's had their say already, so they're not checking for new stuff.
I'm not supporting reply alerts as I also think they'll do more harm than good, just noting that posts come and go pretty quickly.
Worse: There is no point in comming back and edit you post with sources because by that time nobody is going to see it.
Disaster: There is no benefit to writing a thoughful, well sourced comment in the first place because nobody will read it by the time you are done.
[0] The language and original forum are, obviously, open source. But AFAIK you can't make pull requests against the code HN is actually running, which has had tons of modifications made to it, because that's special sauce. There used to be a repo for making bug and feature requests but that seems to no longer be active.
Of course, you could roll your own minimalistic threaded forum, but getting people to move from HN anywhere other than lobste.rs[1] (if they want more moderation) or reddit (if they want less) might be difficult, unless you're serving some specific niche like DataTau[2].
For example, not being able to get reply updates by email means you have to come back to the site to check, for example. Is that good or bad? I don't know the answer, but it selects a different audience. A modern HN would be a different HN community and culture.