The thing is, it's complicated. No one can confidently predict the interplay of all the algorithm factors and user behavior. Hacker News should be hackable (an

The thing is, it's complicated. No one can confidently predict the interplay of all the algorithm factors and user behavior. Hacker News should be hackable (and it's ironic that it's not). The only way to evolve a better system is though lot's of empirical experiments. But because you need a large userbase to do a proper experiment, we've been limited to a dozen or so experiments to-date (HN, reddit, slashdot, etc). Making HN hackable would eliminate this chicken and egg problem. See how much experimentation the Netflix Challenge enabled. Hacker News of all places should enable creative hackers, math studs and inspired experimenters to test their ideas. For this to happen Hacker News needs to make vote data available in the public API, or if that is a no-go, go with another option such as accepting experimental code to run in a sandbox and and allowing it to present an alternate front page and comment rankings. I'd prefer votes becoming public for other reasons though. HN and all its users, and even Paul Graham, know that a better solution for promoting quality knowledge sharing and healthy discourse is needed. What better way to come up with a better way than to let its userbase of hackers hack away at it? If Hacker News were hackable, there would be a blossoming of alternate front pages and comment ranking, and users would vote with their feet, err... clicks.