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Show HN: Submit your ideas for improving HN

43 points by sgdesign 14y ago

ctruman 14y ago
Love the positive thinking. The full screen comment feature alone allows for such a better experience when getting into discussion. Looking forward to a lot of great ideas coming out of this!
KurtMueller 14y ago
Mobile friendly site. I can never view this site while on my cell phone without having to pinch zoom.
- przemoc 14y ago
  Well, I often zoom it on the desktop computers too (depending on OS/Browser settings). :) It could be like killing two birds with one stone actually, because making it mobile friendly quite likely would make it friendlier for non-mobile uses too.
- vahe 14y ago
  There's this: http://ihackernews.com/ http://ihackernews.com/ However, I'd really like an official responsive version.
JoshTriplett 14y ago
Nice idea. A couple of bugs I noticed while poking around on the site: The sign in box seems to break Firefox's ability to save the username and password. When signed in, the "Change password", "My Account", and "Sign out" buttons have three different clashing visual styles. Please consider adding downvotes; for instance, I'd like to downvote ideas like http://hnwishlist.com/posts/ae15555a-f3c1-43f3-8a80-cef2a22e8dad http://hnwishlist.com/posts/ae15555a-f3c1-43f3-8a80-cef2a22e... or http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893fe7f7 http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893f... Also, a little more far-fetched: if you don't mind doing a bit of page-scraping, you might consider letting people link hnwishlist accounts to their HN account. Just have a profile field for an HN account, and let people prove their ownership of an account by putting something like "hnwishlist username: $NAME" in their profile temporarily. Then you could do things like offering upvotes and downvotes using the same karma thresholds as HN.
- sgdesign 14y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! And until I implement downvotes, maybe you could add quick comments to explain why you think those are bad ideas?
codefoe 14y ago
If there will ever come a day when I can ditch the Chrome's HN+ plugin to make HN look good, it will probably be with that. So I'm all for it. Great idea.
edw519 14y ago
The greatest opportunity for improving HN lies with us, not with the site. Here's a good place to start: http://edweissman.com/how-to-participate-in-hacker-news http://edweissman.com/how-to-participate-in-hacker-news
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  That's quite a statement. On a scale from "terrible" to "ideal", the discussion on HN is a lot, lot closer to ideal than the UI/experience is: UNKNOWN OR EXPIRED LINK C'mon, this is 2013... paging dynamic results shouldn't be an issue. What makes HN great does lie with us, but I strongly disagree that it's also the greatest opportunity for improvement.
  - alaskamiller 14y ago
    Maybe you weren't around awhile so you don't know the backstory. Link expiration is partly because the servers back then wasn't able to keep up with datascraping, for example when we made the only useable search engine for a few years.
- jfb 14y ago
  Also, if the community is moving away from you (as is happening to me here), don't fight it; don't whinge; find the good discussions you still feel like contributing to, and let it go. Internet discussion sites and their communities are ephemeral, and to deny that is futile.
- tikhonj 14y ago
  One thing I think more people should do is post contact info in their profiles. Remember, the email field doesn't get displayed! And, of course, people should be more willing to contact each other outside of comments for whatever reason. I've had some very interesting, protracted side conversations from HN and they've all been great. That's also how I've met some very interesting people and seen some very interesting companies. EDIT: Oh hey, reading through your linked post, it seems you have that exact point there, and I was just paraphrasing you. As you can guess, I agree with it wholeheartedly :P.
- 14y ago
rahilsondhi 14y ago
Sacha you are a beast! You're always putting our new projects. I'm starting to notice your designs even before I see your signature too.
- sgdesign 14y ago
  Thank you, that's quite a compliment!
rglover 14y ago
I'm sure most people will dismiss this with "just use email," but I'd love to have an inbox where people could message me. In situations where a comment thread is better suited for a one on one convo, it'd be great. Also a nice way to keep your email private unless necessary.
miguelrochefort 14y ago
You know what? Improving HN is a waste of time. Why can't we just migrate to a better link aggregator, such as Reddit? It would basically fix everything (including design, mobile friendliness, lack of good apps, lack of API, etc), at no cost. I'm sure it would be easier to convince Reddit to let subreddits behave like HN than trying to keep HN up to date with the modern world. Just my two cents.
- tsm 14y ago
  Having PG as a commenter, mod, and admin is a tremendous asset. HN also benefits from the close ties to YC in general--it'd be a bit tricky to tell all the YC folks that they need to post not on news.ycombinator.com but over at reddit.com/r/therealhackernews or whatever.
  - phillmv 14y ago
    HN doesn't benefit from close ties to YC. YC benefits from close ties to HN. YC folks will post to whatever is considered the de rigeur nerd/startup news site, which over the last couple of years has become HN - having migrated from reddit (and slashdot, before). There will be another one, in due time.
  - miguelrochefort 14y ago
    PG could do all those things on Reddit. YC folks could do all those things on Reddit. Just redirect news.ycombinator.com to reddit.com/r/hn2 and that's it.
- sgdesign 14y ago
  I'm not against of migrating to a "better" HN when the time has come, but I doubt it will be Reddit. I think it'll instead be something built from the ground up specifically for this community that serves its needs better than HN currently does. That being said, as someone who's working on this very thing I can say that developing a "Better HN" is far from easy… If you want another example, just look at Discourse (http://discourse.org http://discourse.org). I think it took them one year with a 5 or 6-people team to get there, and I didn't see anybody jumping ship from HN to a Discourse implementation yet.
DanBC 14y ago
I really like the fact that your site seems to work well even with my reduced window width. If you're looking to seed your site with other ideas there are many existing add-ons and clients and etc. Searching Github for ["hacker news"] returns something like 700 hits. Obviously, most of those are not relevant, but different searches for ["hacker news" client] or ["hacker news" extensions] return over 100 projects where people have implemented features that they feel improve HN. The Chrome webstore, and the Firefox add-ons page, also have many projects that people feel improve HN. There's also the userscripts site, and userstyles site, also having many changes to HN.
phillmv 14y ago
http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893fe7f7 http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893f... ("Implement a real name policy") Seriously? Why does anyone think this is a good idea? Can't we just stomp this one out for good? I really miss noms de guerre. It saddens me that we moved away from handles and pseudoanonymity being a default. Says the guy using his real name.
- Par_Avion 14y ago
  I think Hacker News' name policy is just about right. Its public enough that we don't have things going on like 4chan, but its not public to the point people are afraid to comment their opinions.
  - DeepDuh 14y ago
    > Hacker News' name policy.. Did I miss something? I can't find any username policy in HN's guidelines.
    - tikhonj 14y ago
      Well, it has usernames. That's a policy in and of itself! The policy, then, is completely implicit: you can have any valid username which may or may not reflect your own name. Oh, and you can't change them after the fact. As far as I know. That would be a nice feature...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
tsm 14y ago
This is all fantasy. PG runs this in his spare time off a single server. Every feature I saw on the list has viable workarounds. Yes, it'd be nice if they were supported out of the box. But I don't think the lack of native features is negatively impacting the content of HN, which is the most important part. So what's the argument of the site? "Hey PG, we know you're busy funding startups and stuff, but we're mildly inconvenienced by some UX decisions you've made with that experimental site you run on the side, and were hoping that you could take the time to implement these seemingly-minor features that've been discussed on HN for years. In exchange our happiness while using the site will be somewhat increased, and we will instead whine about HN's lack of modern CSS and Twitter Bootstrappiness and what have you."?
- sgdesign 14y ago
  I suggest you read the "About" section, it should answer your doubts.
  - tsm 14y ago
    Where? It talks about "improv[ing] Hacker News" by commenting and voting on HNW ideas--those aren't very concrete. It later admits that the chances of any of this making it into HN proper are "not very high". Half of the About section features the dev (righteously, I'm not complaining) advertising himself .
    - sgdesign 14y ago
      You asked "what's the argument of the site?". The About section makes it very clear that this is a fun side project built as a way to showcase what Telescope can do, and that I don't really expect these ideas to be implemented into the actual HN. You seem angry at something that HNWishlist isn't trying to be at all.
- jmduke 14y ago
  Yes, PG would have to do all of this himself, because there's no way a hundred developers would leap at the chance to contribute to the HN source and make fellow developers happy.
tsm 14y ago
>I use hnnotify, which works really well but relies on scraping. I'd love to see official functionality that works pretty much identically to hnnotify. If it's working "really well", why do you care about the fact that its implementation is a kludge? It seems like we already have a good-enough solution.
- sgdesign 14y ago
  Maybe at some point whoever is behind hnnotify will decide they don't want to pay a huge Sendgrid/Mailgun/whatever bill anymore and shut it down. There's also the simple problem of discoverability. I never knew about hnnotify until now, since it's not part of the main site.
tsm 14y ago
I don't have an account there, but it's worth pointing out that alternative sites like https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs do exist.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
polemic 14y ago
There is a feature requests link at the bottom of the page...
j45 14y ago
Nice implementation of a suggestion/voting site. My suggestion is singular: Let posts be tagged for startups, and bootstrapping, so I can filter everything else out. I'm happy to geek on my own time but what I come here is for startup content and less interesting/novelty stuff.
- gnosis 14y ago
  Tagging has been requested here multiple times, is controversial, and has never been implemented. I, for one, am very much in favor of it. I'd love to be able to filter out topics I don't find interesting. It would also effectively address a lot of griping about supposedly off-topic submissions.
  - j45 14y ago
    I wonder what is so controversial
trxblazr 14y ago
sub HN, like subredit.
djloche 14y ago
Is there any interest in a 'RES' styled enhancement suite for HN? I'd like to think that many of these (and other previously proposed) suggestions/wish lists, someone has already created something to deal with the issues on a client side level rather than trying to get PG to try and change something that works good enough for him.
KevinMS 14y ago
I'd like to see, if not both the up votes and down votes of a particular comment, a score of how "diverging" the ups and downs are. I think it would be very interesting to see when a particular comment is "divisive", (borrowing a common political buzzword)
welder 14y ago
#1 Following users after liking a user's post or comment. (not publicly)

43 points by sgdesign 14y ago

Love the positive thinking. The full screen comment feature alone allows for such a better experience when getting into discussion. Looking forward to a lot of great ideas coming out of this!

KurtMueller 14y ago

Mobile friendly site. I can never view this site while on my cell phone without having to pinch zoom.

przemoc 14y ago
Well, I often zoom it on the desktop computers too (depending on OS/Browser settings). :) It could be like killing two birds with one stone actually, because making it mobile friendly quite likely would make it friendlier for non-mobile uses too.
vahe 14y ago
There's this: http://ihackernews.com/ http://ihackernews.com/ However, I'd really like an official responsive version.

JoshTriplett 14y ago

Nice idea. A couple of bugs I noticed while poking around on the site: The sign in box seems to break Firefox's ability to save the username and password. When signed in, the "Change password", "My Account", and "Sign out" buttons have three different clashing visual styles. Please consider adding downvotes; for instance, I'd like to downvote ideas like http://hnwishlist.com/posts/ae15555a-f3c1-43f3-8a80-cef2a22e8dad http://hnwishlist.com/posts/ae15555a-f3c1-43f3-8a80-cef2a22e... or http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893fe7f7 http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893f... Also, a little more far-fetched: if you don't mind doing a bit of page-scraping, you might consider letting people link hnwishlist accounts to their HN account. Just have a profile field for an HN account, and let people prove their ownership of an account by putting something like "hnwishlist username: $NAME" in their profile temporarily. Then you could do things like offering upvotes and downvotes using the same karma thresholds as HN.

sgdesign 14y ago
Thanks for the feedback! And until I implement downvotes, maybe you could add quick comments to explain why you think those are bad ideas?

codefoe 14y ago

If there will ever come a day when I can ditch the Chrome's HN+ plugin to make HN look good, it will probably be with that. So I'm all for it. Great idea.

edw519 14y ago

The greatest opportunity for improving HN lies with us, not with the site. Here's a good place to start: http://edweissman.com/how-to-participate-in-hacker-news http://edweissman.com/how-to-participate-in-hacker-news

Domenic_S 14y ago
That's quite a statement. On a scale from "terrible" to "ideal", the discussion on HN is a lot, lot closer to ideal than the UI/experience is: UNKNOWN OR EXPIRED LINK C'mon, this is 2013... paging dynamic results shouldn't be an issue. What makes HN great does lie with us, but I strongly disagree that it's also the greatest opportunity for improvement.
- alaskamiller 14y ago
  Maybe you weren't around awhile so you don't know the backstory. Link expiration is partly because the servers back then wasn't able to keep up with datascraping, for example when we made the only useable search engine for a few years.
jfb 14y ago
Also, if the community is moving away from you (as is happening to me here), don't fight it; don't whinge; find the good discussions you still feel like contributing to, and let it go. Internet discussion sites and their communities are ephemeral, and to deny that is futile.
tikhonj 14y ago
One thing I think more people should do is post contact info in their profiles. Remember, the email field doesn't get displayed! And, of course, people should be more willing to contact each other outside of comments for whatever reason. I've had some very interesting, protracted side conversations from HN and they've all been great. That's also how I've met some very interesting people and seen some very interesting companies. EDIT: Oh hey, reading through your linked post, it seems you have that exact point there, and I was just paraphrasing you. As you can guess, I agree with it wholeheartedly :P.
14y ago

rahilsondhi 14y ago

Sacha you are a beast! You're always putting our new projects. I'm starting to notice your designs even before I see your signature too.

sgdesign 14y ago
Thank you, that's quite a compliment!

rglover 14y ago

I'm sure most people will dismiss this with "just use email," but I'd love to have an inbox where people could message me. In situations where a comment thread is better suited for a one on one convo, it'd be great. Also a nice way to keep your email private unless necessary.

miguelrochefort 14y ago

You know what? Improving HN is a waste of time. Why can't we just migrate to a better link aggregator, such as Reddit? It would basically fix everything (including design, mobile friendliness, lack of good apps, lack of API, etc), at no cost. I'm sure it would be easier to convince Reddit to let subreddits behave like HN than trying to keep HN up to date with the modern world. Just my two cents.

tsm 14y ago
Having PG as a commenter, mod, and admin is a tremendous asset. HN also benefits from the close ties to YC in general--it'd be a bit tricky to tell all the YC folks that they need to post not on news.ycombinator.com but over at reddit.com/r/therealhackernews or whatever.
- phillmv 14y ago
  HN doesn't benefit from close ties to YC. YC benefits from close ties to HN. YC folks will post to whatever is considered the de rigeur nerd/startup news site, which over the last couple of years has become HN - having migrated from reddit (and slashdot, before). There will be another one, in due time.
- miguelrochefort 14y ago
  PG could do all those things on Reddit. YC folks could do all those things on Reddit. Just redirect news.ycombinator.com to reddit.com/r/hn2 and that's it.
sgdesign 14y ago
I'm not against of migrating to a "better" HN when the time has come, but I doubt it will be Reddit. I think it'll instead be something built from the ground up specifically for this community that serves its needs better than HN currently does. That being said, as someone who's working on this very thing I can say that developing a "Better HN" is far from easy… If you want another example, just look at Discourse (http://discourse.org http://discourse.org). I think it took them one year with a 5 or 6-people team to get there, and I didn't see anybody jumping ship from HN to a Discourse implementation yet.

DanBC 14y ago

I really like the fact that your site seems to work well even with my reduced window width. If you're looking to seed your site with other ideas there are many existing add-ons and clients and etc. Searching Github for ["hacker news"] returns something like 700 hits. Obviously, most of those are not relevant, but different searches for ["hacker news" client] or ["hacker news" extensions] return over 100 projects where people have implemented features that they feel improve HN. The Chrome webstore, and the Firefox add-ons page, also have many projects that people feel improve HN. There's also the userscripts site, and userstyles site, also having many changes to HN.

phillmv 14y ago

http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893fe7f7 http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893f... ("Implement a real name policy") Seriously? Why does anyone think this is a good idea? Can't we just stomp this one out for good? I really miss noms de guerre. It saddens me that we moved away from handles and pseudoanonymity being a default. Says the guy using his real name.

Par_Avion 14y ago
I think Hacker News' name policy is just about right. Its public enough that we don't have things going on like 4chan, but its not public to the point people are afraid to comment their opinions.
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  > Hacker News' name policy.. Did I miss something? I can't find any username policy in HN's guidelines.
  - tikhonj 14y ago
    Well, it has usernames. That's a policy in and of itself! The policy, then, is completely implicit: you can have any valid username which may or may not reflect your own name. Oh, and you can't change them after the fact. As far as I know. That would be a nice feature...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

tsm 14y ago

This is all fantasy. PG runs this in his spare time off a single server. Every feature I saw on the list has viable workarounds. Yes, it'd be nice if they were supported out of the box. But I don't think the lack of native features is negatively impacting the content of HN, which is the most important part. So what's the argument of the site? "Hey PG, we know you're busy funding startups and stuff, but we're mildly inconvenienced by some UX decisions you've made with that experimental site you run on the side, and were hoping that you could take the time to implement these seemingly-minor features that've been discussed on HN for years. In exchange our happiness while using the site will be somewhat increased, and we will instead whine about HN's lack of modern CSS and Twitter Bootstrappiness and what have you."?

sgdesign 14y ago
I suggest you read the "About" section, it should answer your doubts.
- tsm 14y ago
  Where? It talks about "improv[ing] Hacker News" by commenting and voting on HNW ideas--those aren't very concrete. It later admits that the chances of any of this making it into HN proper are "not very high". Half of the About section features the dev (righteously, I'm not complaining) advertising himself .
  - sgdesign 14y ago
    You asked "what's the argument of the site?". The About section makes it very clear that this is a fun side project built as a way to showcase what Telescope can do, and that I don't really expect these ideas to be implemented into the actual HN. You seem angry at something that HNWishlist isn't trying to be at all.
jmduke 14y ago
Yes, PG would have to do all of this himself, because there's no way a hundred developers would leap at the chance to contribute to the HN source and make fellow developers happy.

tsm 14y ago

>I use hnnotify, which works really well but relies on scraping. I'd love to see official functionality that works pretty much identically to hnnotify. If it's working "really well", why do you care about the fact that its implementation is a kludge? It seems like we already have a good-enough solution.

sgdesign 14y ago
Maybe at some point whoever is behind hnnotify will decide they don't want to pay a huge Sendgrid/Mailgun/whatever bill anymore and shut it down. There's also the simple problem of discoverability. I never knew about hnnotify until now, since it's not part of the main site.

tsm 14y ago

I don't have an account there, but it's worth pointing out that alternative sites like https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs do exist.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

polemic 14y ago

There is a feature requests link at the bottom of the page...

j45 14y ago

Nice implementation of a suggestion/voting site. My suggestion is singular: Let posts be tagged for startups, and bootstrapping, so I can filter everything else out. I'm happy to geek on my own time but what I come here is for startup content and less interesting/novelty stuff.

gnosis 14y ago
Tagging has been requested here multiple times, is controversial, and has never been implemented. I, for one, am very much in favor of it. I'd love to be able to filter out topics I don't find interesting. It would also effectively address a lot of griping about supposedly off-topic submissions.
- j45 14y ago
  I wonder what is so controversial

trxblazr 14y ago

sub HN, like subredit.

djloche 14y ago

Is there any interest in a 'RES' styled enhancement suite for HN? I'd like to think that many of these (and other previously proposed) suggestions/wish lists, someone has already created something to deal with the issues on a client side level rather than trying to get PG to try and change something that works good enough for him.

KevinMS 14y ago

I'd like to see, if not both the up votes and down votes of a particular comment, a score of how "diverging" the ups and downs are. I think it would be very interesting to see when a particular comment is "divisive", (borrowing a common political buzzword)

welder 14y ago

#1 Following users after liking a user's post or comment. (not publicly)