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How Hacker News can be improved, 3 things
- unimpressive 10y agoI'm not sure a recent comments sidebar would fit the aesthetic of Hacker News. The HN software is currently storing whether you've hidden certain comment chains or not, so perhaps it could store what comments existed in what thread when you last visited.
- KajMagnus 10y agoHmm. Not sure I understand this. How would this information be presented to the user? And would the computer somehow assume I've read all comments currently present on the page / in the current comment chain?
- krapp 10y agoYou could highlight the first comment of each new subthread, or have an option to collapse the threads down to that point. You could even have a single button that scrolls down to each consecutive new comment chain. But it would probably have to be a lot more minimalistic than a new sidebar.
- KajMagnus 10y agoOk, that sounds like the Chrome extension that adds "orange lines next to new comments since your last visit", mentioned in this comment (on this same page): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664187 A button to scroll down to the next unread comment thread sounds interesting.
- no_protocol 10y ago> 1. Finding new comments This extension adds orange lines next to new comments since your last visit: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-news/mnlaodleonmmfkdhfofamacceeikgecp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-news/mnlaodle...
- jrs235 10y agoI love that extension. However the other day it stopped working for me for some reason and I couldn't figure out why. It's working again though. Update: and I wish it worked on mobile too.
- KajMagnus 10y agoI suppose that jump-to-parent-&-back can also be implemented as an extension. I'm thinking it'd make sense with both highlighting new comments, + a recent comments list. (If relying only on [highlighting comments posted since the last page load], then sometimes one will miss a few recent comments — because usually one didn't read all comments shown on the page, but the next time the page gets reloaded, [previously shown but not-yet-read comments] will no longer be highlighted.)
- 40acres 10y agoThese suggest look good, especially the first one. I like to view and comment on rising posts and can really have a hard time figuring out what's changed once a post reaches 100+ comments. I use Hacker News Enhancement Suite on Chrome which helps a bit but there isnt an equivalent on mobile.
- bosdev 10y agoThese seem great, but I truely think the biggest thing they could do would be add a line at the top of the page encouraging people to visit /newest. The content that actually makes the front page is somewhat random. I've seen the same thing posted several times, only to have the third posting be on the front page all day. Its also true that much of the content which does make it there is gamed by people who have their friends upvote. Getting more organic votes to new traffic would make that much harder.
- petercooper 10y agoEven just showing 2 or 3 items from /newest in a box at the bottom of the front page would encourage me to vote on them. Maybe only show it to a handful of logged in users with a nominal amount of karma to reduce any effects of it in promoting spam on the front page.
- deegles 10y agoI like this idea. Especially if it takes a random sample of what was submitted in the last N minutes. There could be a little banner saying "Do you think any of the below are better than what's currently on the front page?" or similar.
- divbit 10y agotry http://hckrnews.com http://hckrnews.com ...
- vtempest 10y agothis site http://hkrnews.com/ http://hkrnews.com/ allows you to see the article in an iframe so you can read comments and other headlines all on one page -- faster than clicking between tabs. You can also see the top comments easier by collapsing by clicking the icon
- throwaway98237 10y agoThis is me, as a "normal" user of HN, not reading this article because every time I make any critiques of HN I'm down-voted or told I just don't get the community. But to those of you who engage, I wish you the best of luck.
- bArray 10y agoExactly, the standard of not being able to make criticism of HN or suggesting improvements. It's automatically the fault of the sugestee.
- whybroke 10y agoI recently had about a dozen old posts silently downvoted without comment because I linked to a wikipedia article about marginal utility which apparently deeply annoyed an ideologe. So the de facto workings of the site make me wear downvotes with pride.
- throwaway98237 10y agoMe too! If my comment is up-voted then down-voted then up-voted then down-voted, I know that I've said something that people have different thoughts on, and I know I hit on something. Other times I get down-vote, down-vote, down-vote, just like I thought I would, and am totally happy to take that hit. I put out such comments sometimes knowing they go against the HN grain, and consider the karma-cost as my way of giving back to the community, keeping it honest.
- throwaway98237 10y agoAnd I just got an anonymous down-vote. Love it.
- krapp 10y agoWho cares about being upvoted or downvoted on Hacker News? There are no guidelines or standards for voting, so there's no context to glean from it, unless a comment gets voted into near obscurity (those are usually objectively bad.) Karma is a meaningless number that tells you little about the quality of the person it's attached to. This forum is full of programmers, designers and UX engineers. There's nothing wrong with criticizing the site's layout or interface, that's a sign that you actually care about it.
- LukeB_UK 10y agoI prefer that HN doesn't say the score of other people's comments, it means you have more power to make your own mind up rather than the vote brigading or "piling on" that can happen on Reddit
- dogma1138 10y agoI second that, at least have a score hidden functionality that hides the score of messages for a period of time (say 2-12 hours) and also ensure that the score cannot affect the color of the font during that time.
- KajMagnus 10y agoWhat about after one has made up one's mind, though? Then it could be interesting to compare what one think oneself, with what others think. Then, when one wants to do that, one could click the show-how-other-people-have-voted button, to find out.
- noobermin 10y agoIt depends on how much granularity you desire I suppose. If you downvote and then see the post turn gray or see it turn gray a few minutes afterwards, that's feed back in a sense. Same for if a vote rises to the top in a thread. You get hints of how a comment does, just not a number. The uncertainty there gives you an idea of the communities feelings while not allowing you to split hairs "comment x in thread y has +4 while comment z in thread w (y!=w) has +3, let me down x to make it consistent with z (I hate x's guts anyway)."
- mancerayder 10y agoI would imagine there's a high risk of cognitive bias prior to even reading it. I guess I'll find out when I can see the score of more than just the story itself and my own comments...
- kazinator 10y ago> What if there was a button one could click, to find out what others think about a comment? How would that be different from comments which reply to the comment? What someone thinks about a comment, when written down, becomes a comment. Ah, but perhaps there could be special "annotating replies" which are hidden, and anonymous; they could be used to write things like "I downvoted this because ...". A feature of these "annotating replies" could be that they are ephemeral; they disappear after, say 24 hours. Say, around the same time when a posting becomes ineligible for downvoting. If you access an old post, you woudln't be able to view that material; it would be gone. This quality would discourage people from trying to carry on discussion threads in the annotating replies. Also replies to annotating replies would not be featured: just one flat level.
- KajMagnus 10y ago> How would that be different from comments which reply to the comment? What someone thinks about a comment, when written down, becomes a comment. Well, yes, the thoughts about the comment, becomes a comment — and then the upvote count, shows if many agree with those thoughts. (But not until after one has made up one's own mind, and then clicked the show-upvotes button. Then one can a little bit compare one's own view of the world, with what others think) Re annotating up/downvotes: I think people in general wouldn't want to spend time explaining themselves, if they knew that what they wrote, would be "invisible" to most other visitors. Perhaps a few "kind hearted" people would explain why they downvoted, via annotations, but I'm thinking they'd be too few for this feature to be well-spent-lines-of-code.
- pcmaffey 10y agoI'd love to see a Trending section added. Something in between the front page and New sections. I often rely on comments to determine whether I want to read an article, but the New section has none. The front page on the other hand, is like fishing. A new post 'catching' there is rather random. Paginating to 2nd 3rd etc is then a mismatch of popular older topics and falling newer ones. I want to see newish posts with a few comments, but not so popular that it's on the front page, and not so old that I've likely already seen it before.
- mjevans 10y agoA fourth improvement: Put a VERY brief outline of the key parts of being a good contributor to the HN community in the post input box as a reminder. Remind me what good content here is. Have an AVOID line right above the add comment button. Remind me if I should reply more than once with different parts of relevant discussion if there are a few points that should each have their own reply from a parent post/article. etc. Also a link to HN formatting near the add comment button would be nice.
- lewisl9029 10y agoI would recommend getting rid of downvoting altogether. Downvoting is overwhelmingly used as a means to express disagreement and enact censorship (by reducing visibility), with no regards to the substance and quality of the actual post. I think this is a poisonous feature, that will eventually turn HN into yet another echo chamber if left unchecked. Either flag a post for being off-topic, inappropriate or adding nothing of substance to the discussion, or reply with a counter argument to express disagreement to well-written posts that deserve it (AFAIK, with flagging, unlike with downvoting, users are held to some level of accountability and are liable to losing their flagging rights if they flag posts indiscriminately). The ability to silence opinions different to your own with minimal effort and no accountability can only hurt the quality of discussion here, in my opinion.
- johnmarcus 10y agoHow do you downvote? i only see an upvote button?
- detaro 10y agoYou need a certain amount of karma points to get the downvote button (a few hundred I think).
- mlvljr 10y agoYeah, and make me un-dead! :)
- machiaweliczny 10y agoWhy not modify https://vuejs.org/examples/hackernews.html https://vuejs.org/examples/hackernews.html and have all these features for yourself?
- KajMagnus 10y agoThat one looks beautiful (i.e. the live demo, https://vue-hn.now.sh/top https://vue-hn.now.sh/top). (Personally I don't want to clone & modify it — I've built something in React.js already.) I wonder how the contents at HN is licensed. Is it Creative Commons or ... what is it. I'm surprised HN let people pull the data via an API but don't clarify under what license the data is available. (At least I cannot find it.) — You don't happen to know anything about this? I suppose I can email HN and ask. (Here I found the API announcement: http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api — nothing about any content license)
- tptacek 10y agoWe had publicly visible comment scores, years ago. They generated flame wars: people would compare their scores to the scores of other comments, feel outrage, and start meta-discussions about the scores. Even today, if you follow 'dang and 'sctb (whose comments are the informal moderator log of HN), you'll see a significant chunk of their work is just reminding people not to go on and on about being downvoted. I don't think public comment scores are coming back and I think the quality of discussion is improved without them. There's an interesting phenomenon here about the quality of discussion versus the convenience of consuming comments; it may be that the site is better for participants without the scores, but better for consumers with them. I have fewer opinions about the first two suggestions. But it's worth keeping in mind that HN has some design limitations that also serve as brakes on runaway discussions. For instance: after a day or two, it's hard to hold on to a back-and-forth debate, because the threads aren't especially easy to find. Notice how HN has no feature to alert you to someone having responded to your comment. Reddit has that, and it's a disaster; it's like the badge on Slack that psychologically coerces you to read chat room messages you don't really care about, except on Reddit there's also an implied demand that you write a new comment to respond. Yech. I often want to see the newest comments on a thread (I find myself CMD-F searching for "minutes ago"), but I worry that making it trivially easy to do would have similar effects, of encouraging people to monitor threads waiting for comments to jump on. I have to force myself not to do that sometimes on threads where I have a lot of opinions about the subject. So just some thoughts.