6 ms·
When I emailed mods to argue that the 'web' button should be restored[1], I was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too
by oefrha 6y ago
When I emailed mods to argue that the 'web' button should be restored[1], I was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features. (I routinely use 'hide' but hardly ever use 'favorite'.)
Btw, 'favorite' may be lesser-known but it's certainly not hard to use.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479
- Folcon 6y agoI'd personally find removing favorite rather frustrating as it's a nice way of differentiating posts than just upvoting so that I can easily find them again in the future...
- krapp 6y ago> was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features. That's something you do with a corporate site where you're constantly A/B testing and aggressively removing features that don't generate revenue. Hacker News isn't (or shouldn't be) run that way. It's perfectly fine to have features only a few people use.
- debaserab2 6y agoRemoving features to decrease maintenance overhead is also a pretty legit reason, and you don't have to be a corporate site for that to apply to you (I would say it applies even more to a hobby site). That said, I really hope favorites isn't removed because even though I only discovered the feature a few years ago, I really cherish the comments I've favorited.
- ryandrake 6y agoAlso, “it’s not used frequently” is a really bad reason to remove a feature. Frequency of use is not a proxy for usefulness. I don’t use my backup software’s “restore” feature often but that doesn’t mean it should be removed.
- AlchemistCamp 6y agoWhat's the maintenance cost of the web, save and hide buttons now that they've been implemented and working for years?
- krapp 6y ago"decreasing maintenance overhead" could apply equally to every feature on the site, though. How often do people use polls?
- TheRealPomax 6y agothere are polls?
- krapp 6y ago> there are polls? ...Exactly. It's been a feature forever, it complicates the codebase, and no one ever uses it. Two examples[0,1]. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7033047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7033047 [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039
- oefrha 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll Hardly ever see it used in any capacity though. Re gp: removing buttons shown on every page is probably more about simplifying interface and reclaiming space than maintenance overhead.
- TheRealPomax 6y agothere's no space to reclaim, honestly. If removing a 12pt line of text saves space, please buy a phone that supports more than just WAP.
- dang 6y agoYikes, what a horror: either no new features, or complexity increases forever. Fortunately we don't live in that prison. And what a dystopian reason you give for removing things! The humane reason, of course, for removing features, is so you can add new ones while staying simple. I have always found this to be a deep part of, let's call it, healthy software development, at every level. If you remove things as well as add them—code, features, complexity–then the system can breathe over time. When I say "the system" I include the programmers and the community as well as the code—the whole thing. If you're only allowed to add, that's no longer a creative process, just agglutination.
- krapp 6y ago>Yikes, what a horror: either no new features, or complexity increases forever. Fortunately we don't live in that prison. And fortunately, I didn't suggest that we do, or that features should never be removed... rather that removing a feature that people use because not enough of them use it doesn't make sense for a site like this. If you want more people to use new features, I think you need to put more effort than you do into making those features more visible. Feature discovery is a problem - there's plenty of anecdotal evidence here to attest to that. I can think of a couple of possible solutions, such as having new features be bold for a while after being first introduced, so they're more easily noticed, or pinning a thread announcing new site features, or having something like a devlog listing possible and new changes and comments related to development, to better engage the community in the process (or at least raise their awareness that the site is still being actively worked on,) etc. Or all of those.
- dang 6y agoTotally agree that feature discovery is a problem.
- rorykoehler 6y agoI don’t use favourite often but that’s the point. Favourites are 100% signal
- 3pt14159 6y agoRemoving "hide" is the wrong call. People, especially in work environments, need to be able to hide links for all sorts of reasons. For example, if you work at Apple and there is an inflammatory article or if you've recently lost a family member to suicide and there is an article on a famous figure in the tech community committing suicide like Aaron Swartz, you probably don't want to see that on the homepage of HN for the day. It's one of the best features of Reddit and HN, imo.
- abnry 6y agoHide is important to me too. I don't want to be worked up by the threads that I know will br charged that I'm tempted to click on.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoSeconded. I hide threads I know I won’t be able to have a productive conversation in.
- nitrogen 6y agoThis may have been referring to the "hide" link on the HN homepage, rather than collapsing threads.
- debaserab2 6y agoHide is super useful for threads you want to read but have the typical knee-jerk flamebait war responses at the top that turn into massive comment trees that you want to skip. A lot of times the good stuff is at the bottom.
- jt2190 6y agoSo much this. The population of commenters seems to be dominated by those whose goal is to argue and win, rather than to understand and learn. So many times I see comments that make no attempt to take context into account, and instead conflate all sorts of things, making it impossible to comment productively. (Basic example: Top comment has not replied to the thesis of the article, but to something else.) When one of these types of comments is at the top of the comments list I just hide the whole story, because there’s literally nothing to see but people talking past each other.
- davidwparker 6y agoOh I hope he doesn't remove favorite. I use it all the time.
- stephenhuey 6y agoI have hundreds of favorite comments.
- echelon 6y agoFavorite is one of my most used features. Please don't remove it, dang! :( I frequently go back to these stories, whereas I don't often care to find things I upvoted again. If the two features become conflated, I'll probably stop upvoting so that I can use upvoted stories and posts as a bookmarking system. Please keep favorite stories and posts around. If you're worried about feature utilization, maybe name it "save" for better discoverability. That's essentially what I use the feature for. I don't trust or use browser bookmarks much anymore. HN favorites are high quality bookmarks that work across all my browsers and devices.
- kinleyd 6y agoYes, like you I use favourite routinely. Please don't remove it.
- emerongi 6y agoFavourite is great. I use it sparingly for obvious reasons - I only want truly important items in my favourites list.
- mmsimanga 6y agoSave is a better name. OP has updated list of favourite stories and many of the Ask HN posts make the list because they often yield a lot of useful information in the comments. I use SQL on a daily basis so most of my favourites are SQL stories. I use favourite to bookmark post and comments.
- bbotond 6y agoI really really hope they don't remove favorite. I have a lot of comments and posts saved and return to read them from time to time.
- AlchemistCamp 6y agoI've been missing "web" quite a bit and was just considering emailing him to ask if it was now okay to flag links to inaccessible content!
- pmiller2 6y agoWhy wouldn't it be? Unless you're trying to flag stuff a year after it's been posted, I would expect at least that a posted link would be accessible to read. Unless what you mean is "inaccessible" in the sense of "not accessible to people with disabilities," in which case, good luck flagging a large percent of everything that gets posted. :/
- AlchemistCamp 6y agoUnfortunately, links often go to paywalled content. They each waste my time and make HN worse.
- mattwad 6y agoI didn't even know there was a 'hide' option. Just never looked at anything below the title, really! Been here for a while too
- giancarlostoro 6y agoFavorite gets indirectly used when an up vote cannot be given to a post and a thread is what I've noticed, which would beg the question what would happen if those buttons got removed? I think it would be a shame if hide and favorite were removed, it might be a minor feature but I have used it in the past to make it easier to ignore certain posts.