9 ms·

Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?

15 points by b7bfcdeaab33 5y ago

If you were to completely stop using HackerNews and start using something else, what's the #1 feature you'd want it to have?

c3y 5y ago
Less transphobia and general lack of social consciousness. I'm often on the edge of not reading HN as it is for those reasons, but unfortunately there isn't anything else like its better sides.
- da39a3ee 5y ago
  Can you link to some examples of transphobia on HN? I read HN a lot and don't think you're correct to make that claim.
- implements 5y ago
  HNs isn’t Twitter, and one of its strengths is being intellectually open and discursive. What you see as ‘the obviously true thing everyone should accept, positively affirm, and shun dissenters of’ may not be that. At the very least, none of us should expect HNs to be tailored to our particular set of ideological values, no matter how deeply held - imo.
sandwichbop 5y ago
High signal to noise ratio, but Hacker News already does really well with this regard compared to other platforms.
ajay-b 5y ago
I would very much like to see more sites like HN.
vfulco2 5y ago
Tough to beat, so long as you stay out of the comments section for anything non-related to tech, it's the best source for almost everything to bootstrappers, solo founders, etc.
sfgweilr4f 5y ago
The "downvote due to disagree" thing really annoys me. That and making the text become washed out. I hate it. Especially when I've seen excellent unpopular comments disappear because they were simply unpopular due to politics. Its anti-intellectual. I want to see unpopular comments because they often reveal something interesting. People should be downvoting because its not appropriate intellectually (adds nothing, eg provides no evidence to back up a claim that obviously needs it). Flagging should be because it is simply inappropriate for usually offensive reasons. I rarely comment now. I often don't see the point. I've also often considered a tool to only provide the RSS feed for interesting article discovery then mostly ignore the comments completely. Comments on the ask/show sections are usually more signal than noise. Sometimes even the noise is interesting. Upvotes should exist to make interesting content rise. Uninteresting content then simply sinks to the bottom. But votes are a difficult problem to solve. I'm sure there are too many corner cases I've no idea about.
- Nicksil 5y ago
  >The "downvote due to disagree" thing really annoys me. Absolutely. I agree with everything else you bring up as well. I would love to see down-voting vanish completely and the flagged/dead threshold increased dramatically. It is too easy to drown out otherwise thoughtful, quality contributions to discussion. Instead we see two to three word witty quips float by unscathed. It is the antithesis of the type of discussion described in the guidelines and runs counter to the curation of substantive, meaningful discourse.
  - busymom0 5y ago
    Is there any details on what the current flagged/dead threshold is?
    - Nicksil 5y ago
      >Is there any details on what the current flagged/dead threshold is? No idea. I suspect the details are kept so as to avoid abuse, but I've not read either-or from an authoritative source.
eucryphia 5y ago
As soon as the whole front page is links to paywalled MSM sites, I already check the (source) before clicking. If I wanted to read the headlines and first paragraph of articles in the NYT I'd just sign up for their daily email digest.
- busymom0 5y ago
  I am surprised HN doesn't have an auto-link to archive.org and archive.is for all the link posts. I used it often to bypass the paywalled sites.
  - dang 5y ago
    That's coming.
    - busymom0 5y ago
      Working on new features?
      - dang 5y ago
        Yes!
        krapp 5y ago
        Pease consider a page listing beta features in progress and maybe even a form to sign up for beta testing. People seem to be under the impression (I used to be) that this forum is frozen in amber. Devlogs would be nice too, since just about everyone interested in Arc development is already here, but that might be asking too much.
eigengrau5150 5y ago
Give me the ability to hide certain sites (like Medium, the WSJ, and Substack) and I'll happily switch. HN gets too much spam from content farms, content marketers, and propaganda outlets owned by News Corp.
gillytech 5y ago
I would like to see more of the "invisible web" showing up on the front page. As primarily tech people we should be more familiar with the older and wiser corners of the web and not just a slew of attention grabbing headlines. I have found some of the most fascinating and thought provoking gems on HN over the years which would have otherwise been lost to antiquity. That is something unique that HN brings to the table as opposed to the multitudes of curated headline feeds out there. As other commenters state here, the paywalled MSM stuff should take a backseat. Old timers should be encouraged to submit some of their time-tested and well-worn articles to foster a more stable grounding in the tech industry for the newcomers.
muzani 5y ago
The community in Ask HN is far too pessimistic and sociopathic. I think there's a lot of very ambitious and intelligent people here who have become cynical and narrow focused. There are certain topics that have to be avoided. Ironically the attitude is very anti-startup and against newer, unproven technology. I'd actually love to see a community where we could discuss startups and new tech. Subbreddits tend to swing too young - opinions are strong but unfounded, and there's a strong bias against the tried and true. Something like Indie Hackers attract the idealists who have big dreams but do not act on them.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
The must have features are the existing participants and the moderator.
geoduck14 5y ago
@Dang Dang is my favorite part of HN
pedalpete 5y ago
I've actually been considering this over the last week. I've been a user since the beginning, but I find that I am maybe clicking on one or two links from the first two pages. Seems the value of the content is feeling very bland these days. Which is surprising seeing as we are in such an amazing time technologically. Where has the quality interesting content gone?
anamax 5y ago
Instead of asking "How can I get some participants from Hacker News?", why not ask "Who is out there to serve that doesn't like HN, SlashDot, etc?" There are a lot more people in the second group.
quickthrower2 5y ago
I don’t think you’ll move anyone away with a simple feature such as profile pics or whatever. There is so much goodwill and history and HN attracts great people. Also say you built something better than HN - people won’t leave HN for that they’ll probably use both.
GianFabien 5y ago
All links being to freely accessible articles, i.e. No paywalled sites. No sites that require sign-up, even if just using FB/Google/etc login. No sites that demand that I remove ad-block.
unraveller 5y ago
Feed filtering is the must have feature for our times. All this subscribing and no built-in fine grain negative control is absurd. Right now the number of sites I block per page on HN hovers around 15% to 30%. The front page is always much lower (3%-8%) which tells me the mods actions align with mine about what shouldn't be on the HN front page. I'm settled in to ride out the inevitable decline as I've done for all feed based aggregators like twitter, medium, reddit et al. From experience, when it reaches ~50% block worthy I will stop trying to upvote solid posts and prolong the suffering of others.
mikewarot 5y ago
The idea of compressing voting down to a single unitless dimension seems like there's a whole lot of information loss going on. The fact that this dimension doesn't even have an agreed upon unit vector makes it even worse. There are many dimensions, with different degrees of orthogonality true / false funny / serious insightful / wrong kind / hurtful agree / disagree (useful for votes) I haven't got a clue how a good UX would deal with it, let alone the ranking for display purposes, but I do know the trinary up/neutral/down vote is a big issue.
- weeblewobble 5y ago
  this is how slashdot works (worked?). I never thought it worked that well, it's hard to get people to give you meaningful signal when the choices are so complex
  - mikewarot 5y ago
    Slashdot doesn't seem to keep them separate, so they really don't work that way at all. Information is still tossed to /dev/nul
- chansiky 5y ago
  In terms of agree/disagree, I'd want to add that unrationalized downvotes is not very useful to readers. Someone anonymously disagrees with a statement - but why? Upvotes, on the other hand, makes sense inherently. Someone agrees to the statement, which is rationalized by itself.
sethammons 5y ago
I'd like a better "hide" mechanism - swipe. I'd like to swipe away comments and submissions that I am done with but have them revive if enough points or comments come in after. Eventually the front page would only show new posts or those jumping in popularity (or be empty as I dismissed everything); no infinite scroll.
weeblewobble 5y ago
I've been reading HN daily for over a decade and what's been tempting me to quit lately is the realization of just how stagnant discussion is around here. Privacy dead-enders, soliloquies for the "dream of the open internet", Google cancelling projects, ad blocking, piracy, the "spirit of free speech"... i'm sick of it! It's a nasty combination of smug and boring. One of the things that I've come to appreciate about Twitter is the prominence of the person associated with each tweet. On HN (and reddit) everyone is an amorphous grey blob. On Twitter at least I can find and follow interesting people, and mute/block people that are uninteresting or obnoxious.
- potta_coffee 5y ago
  You've really hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned. HN has become awfully boring, but much more so in the last year or two. I used to keep up with tech here and I've learned a lot about architecture from links and articles posted here, but the conversation seems to have become narrower.
- askafriend 5y ago
  +1 and wayyy too many curmudgeons.
Graffur 5y ago
I would stop using HN if it turned into Reddit - from a comments perspective. I already see it happening on some threads so it's probably a matter of time.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  It's turning into what Reddit was a few years ago. By the time it gets to where Reddit is now, Reddit will be even worse...
  - Graffur 5y ago
    That's a sad thought. I used to love Reddit
krapp 5y ago
Everything I like, and hate, about this place comes down to the community. Features don't mean much either way. That said, I'd like to be able to change my username and be able to archive or delete my content at will. Even a pseudonymous identity and history on any platform can be a liability these days.

15 points by b7bfcdeaab33 5y ago

If you were to completely stop using HackerNews and start using something else, what's the #1 feature you'd want it to have?

c3y 5y ago

Less transphobia and general lack of social consciousness. I'm often on the edge of not reading HN as it is for those reasons, but unfortunately there isn't anything else like its better sides.

da39a3ee 5y ago
Can you link to some examples of transphobia on HN? I read HN a lot and don't think you're correct to make that claim.
implements 5y ago
HNs isn’t Twitter, and one of its strengths is being intellectually open and discursive. What you see as ‘the obviously true thing everyone should accept, positively affirm, and shun dissenters of’ may not be that. At the very least, none of us should expect HNs to be tailored to our particular set of ideological values, no matter how deeply held - imo.

sandwichbop 5y ago

High signal to noise ratio, but Hacker News already does really well with this regard compared to other platforms.

ajay-b 5y ago

I would very much like to see more sites like HN.

vfulco2 5y ago

Tough to beat, so long as you stay out of the comments section for anything non-related to tech, it's the best source for almost everything to bootstrappers, solo founders, etc.

sfgweilr4f 5y ago

The "downvote due to disagree" thing really annoys me. That and making the text become washed out. I hate it. Especially when I've seen excellent unpopular comments disappear because they were simply unpopular due to politics. Its anti-intellectual. I want to see unpopular comments because they often reveal something interesting. People should be downvoting because its not appropriate intellectually (adds nothing, eg provides no evidence to back up a claim that obviously needs it). Flagging should be because it is simply inappropriate for usually offensive reasons. I rarely comment now. I often don't see the point. I've also often considered a tool to only provide the RSS feed for interesting article discovery then mostly ignore the comments completely. Comments on the ask/show sections are usually more signal than noise. Sometimes even the noise is interesting. Upvotes should exist to make interesting content rise. Uninteresting content then simply sinks to the bottom. But votes are a difficult problem to solve. I'm sure there are too many corner cases I've no idea about.

Nicksil 5y ago
>The "downvote due to disagree" thing really annoys me. Absolutely. I agree with everything else you bring up as well. I would love to see down-voting vanish completely and the flagged/dead threshold increased dramatically. It is too easy to drown out otherwise thoughtful, quality contributions to discussion. Instead we see two to three word witty quips float by unscathed. It is the antithesis of the type of discussion described in the guidelines and runs counter to the curation of substantive, meaningful discourse.
- busymom0 5y ago
  Is there any details on what the current flagged/dead threshold is?
  - Nicksil 5y ago
    >Is there any details on what the current flagged/dead threshold is? No idea. I suspect the details are kept so as to avoid abuse, but I've not read either-or from an authoritative source.

eucryphia 5y ago

As soon as the whole front page is links to paywalled MSM sites, I already check the (source) before clicking. If I wanted to read the headlines and first paragraph of articles in the NYT I'd just sign up for their daily email digest.

busymom0 5y ago
I am surprised HN doesn't have an auto-link to archive.org and archive.is for all the link posts. I used it often to bypass the paywalled sites.
- dang 5y ago
  That's coming.
  - busymom0 5y ago
    Working on new features?
    - dang 5y ago
      Yes!
      - krapp 5y ago
        Pease consider a page listing beta features in progress and maybe even a form to sign up for beta testing. People seem to be under the impression (I used to be) that this forum is frozen in amber. Devlogs would be nice too, since just about everyone interested in Arc development is already here, but that might be asking too much.

eigengrau5150 5y ago

Give me the ability to hide certain sites (like Medium, the WSJ, and Substack) and I'll happily switch. HN gets too much spam from content farms, content marketers, and propaganda outlets owned by News Corp.

gillytech 5y ago

I would like to see more of the "invisible web" showing up on the front page. As primarily tech people we should be more familiar with the older and wiser corners of the web and not just a slew of attention grabbing headlines. I have found some of the most fascinating and thought provoking gems on HN over the years which would have otherwise been lost to antiquity. That is something unique that HN brings to the table as opposed to the multitudes of curated headline feeds out there. As other commenters state here, the paywalled MSM stuff should take a backseat. Old timers should be encouraged to submit some of their time-tested and well-worn articles to foster a more stable grounding in the tech industry for the newcomers.

muzani 5y ago

The community in Ask HN is far too pessimistic and sociopathic. I think there's a lot of very ambitious and intelligent people here who have become cynical and narrow focused. There are certain topics that have to be avoided. Ironically the attitude is very anti-startup and against newer, unproven technology. I'd actually love to see a community where we could discuss startups and new tech. Subbreddits tend to swing too young - opinions are strong but unfounded, and there's a strong bias against the tried and true. Something like Indie Hackers attract the idealists who have big dreams but do not act on them.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

The must have features are the existing participants and the moderator.

geoduck14 5y ago

@Dang Dang is my favorite part of HN

pedalpete 5y ago

I've actually been considering this over the last week. I've been a user since the beginning, but I find that I am maybe clicking on one or two links from the first two pages. Seems the value of the content is feeling very bland these days. Which is surprising seeing as we are in such an amazing time technologically. Where has the quality interesting content gone?

anamax 5y ago

Instead of asking "How can I get some participants from Hacker News?", why not ask "Who is out there to serve that doesn't like HN, SlashDot, etc?" There are a lot more people in the second group.

quickthrower2 5y ago

I don’t think you’ll move anyone away with a simple feature such as profile pics or whatever. There is so much goodwill and history and HN attracts great people. Also say you built something better than HN - people won’t leave HN for that they’ll probably use both.

GianFabien 5y ago

All links being to freely accessible articles, i.e. No paywalled sites. No sites that require sign-up, even if just using FB/Google/etc login. No sites that demand that I remove ad-block.

unraveller 5y ago

Feed filtering is the must have feature for our times. All this subscribing and no built-in fine grain negative control is absurd. Right now the number of sites I block per page on HN hovers around 15% to 30%. The front page is always much lower (3%-8%) which tells me the mods actions align with mine about what shouldn't be on the HN front page. I'm settled in to ride out the inevitable decline as I've done for all feed based aggregators like twitter, medium, reddit et al. From experience, when it reaches ~50% block worthy I will stop trying to upvote solid posts and prolong the suffering of others.

mikewarot 5y ago

The idea of compressing voting down to a single unitless dimension seems like there's a whole lot of information loss going on. The fact that this dimension doesn't even have an agreed upon unit vector makes it even worse. There are many dimensions, with different degrees of orthogonality true / false funny / serious insightful / wrong kind / hurtful agree / disagree (useful for votes) I haven't got a clue how a good UX would deal with it, let alone the ranking for display purposes, but I do know the trinary up/neutral/down vote is a big issue.

weeblewobble 5y ago
this is how slashdot works (worked?). I never thought it worked that well, it's hard to get people to give you meaningful signal when the choices are so complex
- mikewarot 5y ago
  Slashdot doesn't seem to keep them separate, so they really don't work that way at all. Information is still tossed to /dev/nul
chansiky 5y ago
In terms of agree/disagree, I'd want to add that unrationalized downvotes is not very useful to readers. Someone anonymously disagrees with a statement - but why? Upvotes, on the other hand, makes sense inherently. Someone agrees to the statement, which is rationalized by itself.

sethammons 5y ago

I'd like a better "hide" mechanism - swipe. I'd like to swipe away comments and submissions that I am done with but have them revive if enough points or comments come in after. Eventually the front page would only show new posts or those jumping in popularity (or be empty as I dismissed everything); no infinite scroll.

weeblewobble 5y ago

I've been reading HN daily for over a decade and what's been tempting me to quit lately is the realization of just how stagnant discussion is around here. Privacy dead-enders, soliloquies for the "dream of the open internet", Google cancelling projects, ad blocking, piracy, the "spirit of free speech"... i'm sick of it! It's a nasty combination of smug and boring. One of the things that I've come to appreciate about Twitter is the prominence of the person associated with each tweet. On HN (and reddit) everyone is an amorphous grey blob. On Twitter at least I can find and follow interesting people, and mute/block people that are uninteresting or obnoxious.

potta_coffee 5y ago
You've really hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned. HN has become awfully boring, but much more so in the last year or two. I used to keep up with tech here and I've learned a lot about architecture from links and articles posted here, but the conversation seems to have become narrower.
askafriend 5y ago
+1 and wayyy too many curmudgeons.

Graffur 5y ago

I would stop using HN if it turned into Reddit - from a comments perspective. I already see it happening on some threads so it's probably a matter of time.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
It's turning into what Reddit was a few years ago. By the time it gets to where Reddit is now, Reddit will be even worse...
- Graffur 5y ago
  That's a sad thought. I used to love Reddit

krapp 5y ago

Everything I like, and hate, about this place comes down to the community. Features don't mean much either way. That said, I'd like to be able to change my username and be able to archive or delete my content at will. Even a pseudonymous identity and history on any platform can be a liability these days.