Ask HN: How would you improve Hacker News?
Mandatory flair when people submit posts so later everyone can search by topic.
"machine learning" "health tech" "web dev" "biotech" "systems" ... etc.
There's just too much new content to constantly keep up and always spot articles about one topic if you are interested. The search doesn't really work for this either.
Most of my "suggestions" have to do with the UX and some of them are probably coming eventually, and a lot have been suggested by other people as well. Let the metaposting begin ...
- collapsible comments.
- auto merging of identical stories into subtrees on the new/news pages so no one story can overwhelm it
- collapse comments on identical stories into subtrees on the new comments page so no one story can overwhelm it
- don't show comments from stories on the new comments page which are more than two levels deep, because they're not likely to be directly relevant to the OP (and it discourages fueling possible flamewars.)
- don't show comments on the new comments page which have been voted down, to discourage drive-by downvotes.
- don't allow voting from the new comments page - if someone wants to vote they should have to actually read the thread.
- links to comments on the new comments page should lead to the parent of that comment, where it exists, to include part of the context.
- the ability to sort a thread chronologically.
- a way to save threads and comments other than upvoting them.
- a way to unsave threads and comments.
- reversible voting.
- remove the greying out of text posts.
- remove the greying out of downvotes.
- remove visible karma counts.
- don't allow posts to be deleted after they've been replied to, or auto-kill or auto-prune replies to a deleted post.
- an option to change your username.
- display green usernames as a randomly generated hash. This would hopefully discourage trolls adopting personas with ironic and insulting usernames, which seems to happen a lot.
- boards, hashtags, some extra bit of abstraction to sort stories by.
- replace shadowbanning with actual banning or show a message to a banned user when they're logged in informing them of their status and that their comments will need community approval for the time being. Basically, no longer expect it to work by fooling people.
better purging of identical topics. I see the same article or topic appear several times over a few days.
Currently, this relies on moderators and users flagging duplicate articles, which is very labor intensive. The automated software can kill duplicates with identical URLs, but it would take some pretty sophisticated AI to reliably figure out that two articles with entirely different titles are talking about the same topic (and which of the articles is the primary or higher-quality reference).
A key aid would be a disincentive to posting duplicates, e.g. lose rather than gain karma points by doing so.
Many sites are trolling for extra hits by deliberately munging their URLs, either appending random crap to the URL itself (e.g. gamedevdaily.io) or appending fake fragment identifiers (medium, signalvnoise) to evade automatic dupe detection using simple URL duplication.
In the meantime, dupes are "winners" for both the poster (intercepting activity and, thereby, points) and the site (gaining more visibility, since your site appears 2X-4X more in HN than it would otherwise).