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To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning. Keep up the fantastic moderati
by isoprophlex 6y ago
To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.
Keep up the fantastic moderation and the wonderful lack of innovation, HN people!
- karlakush 6y agoFor me, the biggest feature is the lack of ads. Well except for the job postings, which I strongly suspect are unlabeled ads.
- saagarjha 6y agoThey're job ads from YC companies, as mentioned in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoWe have ads here, they just have to be carefully crafted infomercials with a high payoff for the advertisee, enough that it could not be an ad ...
- TeMPOraL 6y agoBasically, "Mission. Fucking. Accomplished." - https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/.
- LunaSea 6y agoYou're joking, right? On tech topics, every third comment is somebody pointing to their company. Sometimes they mention it and sometimes not but it's still advertisement. Not even talking about people spamming their site.
- brianzelip 6y agoFor sure. This helps to keep it part of the old/weird web like the related articles that get much attention here. I appreciate it.
- coronadisaster 6y agoOften there is too much censoring going on but at least they appear to be a bit more transparent about it now. The one feature that I would like to see is to be able to collapse all comments by default (and read only top level comments). And often, comments critical of HN like this one first get many upvotes and then get sent back to a neutral 1... which is what just happened
- dang 6y agoIt happened because some users upvoted it and others downvoted it. What did you think was happening?
- coronadisaster 6y agoI was even asked to change my nickname once, I think it was by you. The nickname was nothing bad, you just didn't like it.
- dang 6y agoThat doesn't sound like us, though of course it's always possible that we made a mistake. I've made hundreds of thousands of moderation decisions and tens of thousands of posts. No doubt thousands of those, at least, were wrong. If you're going to make a claim like this, you should provide a link so that readers can make up their own minds. When such complaints show up linklessly, it's usually because there's more to the story that the complaint is omitting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20linkless&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
- coronadisaster 6y ago> If you're going to make a claim like this, you should provide a link so that readers can make up their own minds. fair enough: https://i.imgur.com/Iu7CLxN.png https://i.imgur.com/Iu7CLxN.png or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16834895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16834895
- VHRanger 6y agoCompletely agreed. The site: 1) loads instantly 2) is mostly plaintext. Reddit, for what it's worth, provides about the same features but on an absolutely heavyweight site. Especially the new (redesigned) SPA reddit
- moonchild 6y agohttps://i.reddit.com/ https://i.reddit.com/
- u801e 6y agoHow does that compare with https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com ?
- snazz 6y agoi.reddit.com is way more basic than old.reddit.com. It's intended for ancient cell phones or the slowest of slow connections. It's actually pretty impressive that it works at all these days.
- giantDinosaur 6y agoFundamentally all reddit is is some comments and upvotes in a database combined with a ranking algorithm of some kind. Other than scale, the actual core functionality is exceedingly basic, so I hope they maintain these old versions (mainly old.reddit) for a long, long time.
- mrob 6y agoi.reddit.com has infinite scrolling, so it's worse.
- imgabe 6y agoYou can also append .compact to any url for a simple mobile- friendly version of reddit. I refuse to use the app and this works great for me.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ummonk 6y agoI do wish it had some styling changes on mobile though - hitting vote buttons, reply links, etc. is rather difficult because of how small everything is.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoThey are brilliant at managing change, which is why people keep saying "it doesn't change." No, they don't do redesigns for the sake of redesigning, but (two examples off the top of my head) they added a "past" section and they added a character count for titles when you are submitting. Their motto is "move slow and preserve things." They do change, but not stupidly and they do so with a great deal of respect for what is currently working, which is something many, many, many people in the world utterly fail at it. It is the norm to take for granted the things that are going right, then act all surprised when changes result in throwing the baby out with the bath water. It's enormously hard to make thoughtful tweaks of the sort the happen here, that get researched and thought through over very long periods of time and go largely unnoticed by the collective subconscious of the site. It's the sort of the thing the world needs more of, but also the world needs more commentary on "Well, we did make this, that and the other tweaks, while leaving most stuff intact." because it does tend to go unnoticed and it does tend to get characterized as "never changing."
- saagarjha 6y agoThey added a lang tag recently, too. There’s small changes that go in all the time.
- phs318u 6y ago> They do change, but not stupidly and they do so with a great deal of respect for what is currently working, which is something many, many, many people in the world utterly fail at it. An excellent design motto. Respect what works!
- DrJaws 6y agoI can almost instantly load a hn page, but you go somewhere else similar like reddit? 8 10 seconds of rendering.
- m463 6y agoI wish there was a way of fixing posts that accidentally indented their text 2 spaces.
- chrisandchips 6y agoIts funny, because it almost makes the few of them even more enticing. I didn’t realize that you could change the colour of the top bar past a certain karma, but now that I do there is literally nothing I want more than to get there
- metrokoi 6y agoThe greatest sin in building or maintaining anything is fixing something that ain't broken.
- quietbritishjim 6y agoI do wish there were one exception to this: as a way to nicely format quotes of other comments, the way Reddit does when you prefix a line with > (or multiple > for nested quotes). I actually think totally unformatted quotes are fine or even preferable: > To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning. But so many people abuse the code formatting for these To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning. I probably see it more often than I see actual code, and it's infuriating to read on mobile. People posting this way don't see the problem themselves (presumably they're posting from desktop), so it's just going to carry on persisting regardless of how "wrong" they are. At the very least, an instant preview or enforced separate preview-before-posting page would help a lot, especially if either it was narrow enough to represent mobile, or had a warning below not to abuse code snippets that way if there's a detected code snippet. (A preview would help anyway because the reply edit box is monospace, which is really hard to read. I often end up posting an initial draft immediately and using the edit page to fix it up.)
- zzo38computer 6y agoThere is one feature I would like to see: NNTP. Failing that, a strict chronological mode.