Here's my 2c. All these clever ranking algorithms are irrelevant technicalities in chatting platforms. What matters is the type of people that constitute your a

Here's my 2c. All these clever ranking algorithms are irrelevant technicalities in chatting platforms. What matters is the type of people that constitute your audience. Reddit chooses to cater to emotions: their front page encourages low-effort posts that invoke strong emotions (outrage, etc.) and those emotions nudge their audience to argue with each other and spend more time on the site. This particular type of people - emotional and combative - are good for their revenue model, so reddit specifically caters to them. HN is the other end of the spectrum: it caters to audience that values dry precise knowledge. HN's (or rather YC's) business model revolves around this type of people, so HN is carefully designed to attract its audience and repel everyone else. The HN's primitive design isn't a flaw, but a carefully designed feature with that goal in mind. If you're designing a new platform like that, the number one question is "what audience do I want on my forum?" Once you have an answer, you can design the UX and various technicalities: it may be a super-dry arxiv-style forum if you want scientists or a flashy and colorful site leveraging emotions. The common mistake is to try to design a general-purpose forum where people of all types would figure it out among themselves how and what to talk about. That's not gonna work because a Joe-the-redneck can't have a meaningful conversation with a Joe-the-scientist: either the former will start a fight, or the latter will leave. For example, from your description: "an open website for discussing news, science, technology, politics <...> sqwok to be minimal, simple, and approachable for non-tech users." See, you're trying to mix science with politics with non-tech users and so on. Edit: using words from the Thiel's "zero to one" book, you need to find your niche where you can differentiate from competitors, win that local competition, and only then expand.