My personal conceptualization (for which I have no real evidence) of the general design goals of large social media platforms is that they seek to emulate the e

My personal conceptualization (for which I have no real evidence) of the general design goals of large social media platforms is that they seek to emulate the experience of cable television. One local minima of this design is the experience of channel-surfing but with ML driving the "next" button (see: TikTok). I suspect that presenting the user with only one or two posts at a time is useful not only for determining which post to attribute the next user action to but also for triggering addiction through intermittent reinforcement. To pursue this design pattern further I would suggest that OP continue to reduce the post density by incorporating meta tag images and videos. Additionally, adding "friendly" animations for upvotes would be useful. Slot machines are a great example of the type of slow-ish, satisfying animations designers at Facebook appear to be emulating. However, I think the main issue is that most users of HN don’t come here to "veg out and channel surf". There’s a reason the McMaster Carr catalog and the Sears catalog ended up looking extremely different. I would suspect that the average HN user is here to feel connected to the technology startup community and understand the latest technical trends and opinions. I further assume that they are someone who values their time and enjoys learning new things. Using these assumptions I would suggest robust keyboard navigation and "url threading" (a quick way to see other posts which contain the same url) as UI improvements which may be more appreciated. Github’s interface may be a good place to draw inspiration.